Finally, in an online world of gratuitous snark, one courageous editor has displayed the vision to give thumbs down to thumbs down. You read that right: no negative reviews.  “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” the recently hired book editor Isaac Fitzgerald [at BuzzFeed ] rhetorically wondered in an interview with the Poynter Institute. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Yeah, that. Not just the smart-aleck Gawker crowd — those too-cool-for-school types who think a potty-mouth crack-using mayor in Canada is somehow a natural object of ridicule — but the entire mob of vandals: Harold Bloom. Margaret Atwood. Umberto Eco. Don Rickles. Saddam Hussein. So superior, the whole lot of them.

via Banning the Negative Book Review – NYTimes.com.