A 55,000-Word Blog Post

Damon Linker questions the quality of books written within over the course of a few months:

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

It's not the amount of time that's taken in writing a book that matters, it seems to me. Some masterpieces have been written very quickly. It's the motivation. If your primary motivation is to hit the hot button, to rush a book to market around a newsy meme, then you are unlikely to produce anything that lasts. I miss the days when books were written because an author simply had something to say and took her time to say it well.