Publishing, even among culture industries, is notoriously sleepy as a capitalist enterprise. Many enter the field—and take spiritual compensation in lieu of higher pay, shaping employee demographics—because they love literature.
In a 1985 essay on Susan Sontag, her friend the translator and poet Richard Howard noted that one of Sontag’s preferred techniques of fiction was the mise en abime—the repetition of forms and elements such that “the story is inlaid within the story.”
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
