It’s been a week of the literati gnashing their teeth: The Guardian reports on why MI-5 spied on George Orwell for a decade; Slate posts excerpts of Dead Certain, Robert Draper’s revealing new book on the Bush presidency; The Atlantic posts “an attack on the growing pretentiousness of America’s literary prose” titled A Reader’s Manifesto; and the Columbia Journalism Review writes that “the decline of the coverage of books isn’t new, benign or necessary.”