The ‘Observer’ Takes on Phil Gourevitch, Assistant EnvyIn today’s Observer profile about Phil Gourevitch, we learn a few things about the man’s tenure as new editor of the Paris Review. He’s handsome, he’s doing a great job, yadda yadda yadda. But the best thing we learned was about the profile’s author, scribe Doree Shafrir. She is really, really excited about the editorial assistants at the Paris Review under George Plimpton. Here how she waxes poetic, not about Plimpton himself, but about the glamorous lives of his aides and interns:
Some, if not most, of the magazine’s appeal never had anything to do with what was actually in the magazine; it was about the idea of the magazine, the mystique associated with it as a place where young lovers of literature, most of whom were the well-groomed and well-mannered graduates of the nation’s elite colleges, could apprentice for a year, or more, after college, and attend some glamorous parties in exchange for reading through the slush pile.