Numlock Sunday: Amos Barshad, "No One Man Should Have All That Power"

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Amos Barshad, the author of No One Man Should Have All That Power. It’s all about Rasputins and Svengalis and all the shadowy figures who operate behind-the-scenes to make stars, and I am really loving the book. Amos and I somewhat overlapped when I was at FiveThirtyEight and he at Grantland, and I’m a really big fan of his work. 

We spoke about how people who can’t play instruments worth a damn manage to be essential at crafting the pop soundscape, how Raymond Carver’s terse style was largely an invention of an editor, and what the deal was with the guy who purports to be Putin’s Rasputin.

The book can be found at Amazon and sellers near you, it’s a really enjoyable read. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Walt Hickey: Can you tell me a li…