The 10 finalists for Time's Person of the Year.

I know. I hate getting suckered into this annual nonsense, but the list presents some interesting options"

Bashar Assad, President of Syria
Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder
Ted Cruz, Texas Senator
Miley Cyrus, Singer
Pope Francis, Leader of the Catholic Church
Barack Obama, President of the United States
Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Edward Snowden, N.S.A. Leaker
Edith Windsor, Gay rights activist

It's not going to be Assad. If we were going to do Bad Guy persons of the year, somebody more dramatically bad would have won recently, like Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. It would be pathetic to reward Assad with that kind of attention. What about Vladimir Putin? He's not even on the list of finalists, probably because he's already won, back in 2007.

Scratch Hassan Rouhani. He hassan done enough yet.

It's not going to be Barack Obama. He's already won — repeatedly — right? And he was barely there this year, never around when anything was happening. I might accept a jocular nod to The Absence of Barack Obama, because that metaphysical being has been everywhere, involved in everything.

As for Kathleen Sebelius, that's ridiculous. If they were at all thinking of giving it to her, they should have switched to one of those nameless, faceless type of "persons" like The Endangered Earth (1988) or You (2006) or The Whistleblowers (2002) and give it to The Uninsured, The Young Invincibles, The Coders, or The Bugs or something.

It's not going to be Jeff Bezos, because he already won, even if that's hard to remember because it was so last century. 1999.

An entertainer has never won, so there's zero chance that the first one will be Miley Cyrus. Popes have won, but I think it's a bit early to go with another Pope yet, unless the Time folk are itching to play Obama's recently attempted income inequality theme. I think that would be shabby, so I say no.

That leaves Edith Windsor, Ted Cruz, and Edward Snowden. I think Edith Windsor is most likely, because: 1. She gives Time a chance to pick an individual woman, something they've done — embarrassing! — only once before. (It was Corazon C. Aquino, in 1986.) 2. She's a good figurehead for same-sex marriage and gay rights, which were very big this year. 3. It lets Time vary the usual focus on politics, economics, and foreign affairs.

There's Ted. Dear sweet, crazy, everyone-hates-him Ted. If Time is smelling blood and wants to punch around a conservative, the man to pick on is definitely Ted Cruz.

Edward Snowden is an interesting choice, but I don't think it helps Obama to create an occasion for everyone to focus on the NSA problem. Yeah, it's a distraction from healthcare.gov, but does Obama want help in that form? This is a 4th reason to go with Edith Windsor: Gay marriage is a subject that casts a flattering light on Obama.

So we have a winner, don't you think? Edith Windsor.

Mr. Bezos, tear down that wall.

I don't think the ownership of the WaPo has exchanged hands yet, but my first thought on hearing the news that Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post is: He should take down the paywall. For about a day, I imagined that maybe he'd already made that happen. I was getting to lots of articles, but it turned out it was just close enough to the beginning of the month that I hadn't maxed out on the free access yet.

This morning, I'm trying to read "Jeff Bezos, The Post's incoming owner, known for a demanding management style at Amazon" and I have to hit the "reader" button to get to the text. Bezos needs to demand that the wall go. Having more readers is what really matters. Turning all that volume into money is something that can happen later. Isn't that how Amazon works? And anyway, Bezos already has so much money that he doesn't need to use WaPo to get more money. He needs it for his personal prestige and power. More readers suits that goal better than squeezing some money out of some of them.

Anyway, what is this "demanding style"? Paragraph 1 says he ends conversations that go on too long. Paragraph 2 says he has a "famously long-term approach." Interesting combination relating to time: patience in one sense and not in another. He's patient with the development of the product and the market, but wants efficiency internally. Paragraph 3 reinforces that point:

He favors a nimble, loosely organized company in which “two-pizza teams” execute important corporate tasks, because a work group requiring three pizzas over a lunch meeting is inherently too cumbersome. And he often requires employees pitching new ideas to write mock news releases for their product’s imagined launch, a way of focusing their minds on what will most excite customers.

Put it in writing. Don't blather with me for an hour, when you can crystallize your thoughts through the writing process, and I can read it all in a minute.

Reading on, there's lots about efficiency. It's one thing to hate to waste any time — many of us identify with that. What's unusual is the willingness to impose rigorous efficiency on others, to decline the comforts of being nice to the people in your immediate environment, and to do it out of regard for the customers, the people out there, out of your sight.

How will this style apply to running the newspaper?

Bezos has said that he intends to keep his focus on Amazon and keep his home in the Seattle area rather than becoming a fixture in Washington, as four generations of The Post’s outgoing owners, the Graham family, have been.

Good. Be the outsider. Be in it for us, the readers, not to be a part of some sick insider culture.

Bezos also has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint presentations.

Take away their crutches.

Bezos all but banned such presentations at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking. Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are no longer than six pages.

The idea for Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus their thoughts and think them through.

So Bezos has been about writing. Writing, marketing, efficiency... Okay. Show us the newspaper.

And stop blocking the view. Tear down that wall.