via @willsh

Collected Emily Temple

Sigh. Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read. Click through for our countdown of the thirty harshest author-on-author burns in history, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!

30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand

“A great cow full of ink.”

29. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri

“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”

27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)

“How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”

26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”

25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound

“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence

“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)

“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling

“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen

“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”

17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)

“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”

15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote

“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)

“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger

“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

7. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)

“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

6. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”

5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

2. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)

“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

1. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928)

“My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”

Bonus:I recently found this letter Mr. Rogers wrote to me when I was 6.

Written by theweek

With its airy layout, glass staircases, and iHappy atmosphere, the typical Apple Store is a very, very pleasant place. That is, of course, no coincidence. A new Wall Street Journal report uses confidential Apple Store training materials and interviews with former store employees to give a behind-the-scenes look at just how the gadget giant stealthily shapes every customer’s experience. Here, 10 secrets of the Apple Store revealed:

1. It’s not about selling

Several customer service manuals note that employees should focus on solving customers’ problems, not selling them new products. “Your job is to understand all of your customers’ needs — some of which they may not even realize they have,” reads one manual. Employees don’t work on commission or have quotas to meet.

2. … unless we’re talking service plans

There may be no quotas, but former employees say selling service plans along with iGadgets is a must. Those who don’t ring up enough service plans are retrained, or given a different job.

3. There’s a cutesy acronym

A 2007 employee training manual lays out the A-P-P-L-E “steps of service” with an acronym of the company name: “Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome,” “Probe politely to understand all the customer’s needs,” “Present a solution for the customer to take home today,” “Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns,” and “End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.” It is reportedly still in use today.

4. Steve Jobs is very, very involved

Apple’s CEO is involved in the minute details of the stores, giving input on crucial details, like what kind of security cables tether products to tables.One source recalls visiting Jobs shortly after his liver transplant two years ago, only to find the recovering honcho fussing over blueprints for future Apple stores.

5. The customer is always right (about pronunciations)

One Apple store employee recalls being told that he should never correct a customer who mispronounced the name of a product, lest they feel patronized.

6. Employees get canned for being late

Forget the 15-minute rule, and make sure your watch isn’t behind (or just use your iPhone for the time). Apple employees can be fired for being more than six minutes late three times in a six-month period. Six minutes!

7. And they must stay positive

Genius Bar employees are trained not to use negative language. When they can’t solve a technical issue, they’re told to say, “as it turns out” instead of “unfortunately.” A confidential manual also advises on the specific language to use with “emotional” customers. “Listen and limit your responses to simple reassurances that you are doing so. ‘Uh-huh’ ‘I understand,’ etc,” it reads.  “Apple is pretty controlling… to say the least,”says Damon Poeter at PCMag.

8. … and keep quiet

Strange that your friendly Apple employee doesn’t seem to know any of the widely reported rumors about the iPhone 5? It’s probably all just an act. Employees are under strict orders not to discuss rumors about any upcoming products, or prematurely acknowledge widespread technical issues with a current product. Any employee caught writing about Apple is fired.

9. … especially if they’re new

Why isn’t that Apple employee even acknowledging you? He may just be new to the job. While undergoing training, recent hires aren’t allowed to interact with customers. They shadow a more seasoned employee for a few weeks until they’re ready to go their own way. Apple “spends a lot of time and resources on actually training its retail employees,” says Bryan Chaffin at The Mac Observer. That’s “something almost unheard of in the low-margin retail industry.”

10. And about that Genius Bar appointment…

You booked your Genius Bar appointment online, showed up a few minutes before the scheduled time, and somehow you still had to wait an hour to talk with a “Genius.” There’s a reason for that. Wall Street Journalsources say Genius Bar appointments are typically triple booked. No wonder the bar is often swamped.

Read the entire Wall Street Journal article here.

Bonus: This chart has saved my ass more than I care to mention.