The Death of Book World
In April of 2023, when I was fresh out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy, I was hired as the nonfiction critic at the newly revived books section of the Washington Post. The shock to my system was immediate. In graduate school, where I studied aesthetics and German philosophy, I seldom came into contact with anyone who did anything else; even a brush with a classicist or the occasional stray Cartesian felt like something of a transgression. But the Post, it turned out, was much less siloed than the university. On my first day, I discovered that Books was seated next to Food. I broke a sweat scrambling eggs, and here, next to me, was a woman explaining patiently over the phone, “You don’t need to tell the readers which kind of chicken breast to use. They can choose organic if they want to.” A couple of days later, I overheard a heated discussion about salting pasta water. I hadn’t known that I cared about salting pasta water, but, in the course of my prurient listening, I found that I did, or at least that I cared that other people cared.
I like to think that some of the readers of my late section, Book World, made the same sort of leap. Maybe they hadn’t expected to be waylaid by a book review when they opened the paper to read about Donald Trump’s latest indiscretion or to check the score of a Capitals game; maybe they didn’t seek out literary criticism because they didn’t realize they liked it, or didn’t even know what it was. But they subscribed to a general-interest newspaper, so they happened upon its books coverage occasionally—and, sometimes, they stopped to read it.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry." layout="inline" class="BaseText-fEwdHD ExternalLinkEmbedDek-KGahj cMaSzD evzMdD">Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
In the three years that I worked at the Post, I fielded mail from all manner of people—doctors, teachers, prison inmates, and, not infrequently, Ralph Nader—about reviews I had written of everything from Senator Josh Hawley’s book about masculinity to the letters of Gustave Flaubert. Readers wrote from the D.C. suburbs and the Netherlands, from Arizona and New York. What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed.
From now on, the Post will no longer accommodate the admirably omnivorous avidity of its best readers. Visitors to its home page will no longer come across unforeseen book reviews, or really much writing about the arts at all. Last week, the paper fired close to half of the staff who remained after a previous round of layoffs, gutting its local and international desks, decimating its sports and arts coverage, and eliminating Book World altogether. No one who has anything to do with books remains employed at the paper, although I am told that the opinion section (exhorted last year to cheerlead for “personal liberties and free markets,” and Trumpism along with them) will run the occasional facsimile of a review. The Associated Press stopped publishing book reviews last fall; the Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing.
There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like The Drift and The Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.
Unlike the specialized literary magazine and its informal cousin, the literary blog, the general-interest newspaper has a kind of noble rapacity, an encyclopedic ambition to wrap its arms around the whole of the world. The Times insists that it strains to publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” and the Washington Post’s own principles, written by Eugene Meyer in 1935, when he became the paper’s publisher, proclaim that it “shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.” (They also promise that “the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good,” something that the paper’s present owner appears to have forgotten, if he ever knew it.) Whether the Times and the Post live up to their own standards in any given instance, or whether any newspaper can, there is an important difference between the completist ideal and a niche one, between “ALL the truth” and the truncated truth that a reader has already demonstrated she is willing to pay for—or, worse, the thin sliver of half-truth that her algorithm feeds her, mirroring her own existing tastes in a dismal mise en abyme.
A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public.
It is true, of course, that the public is only a useful fiction. No one has ever seen one in the wild. Some readers refuse to join one, stubbornly persisting in flipping to one section and ignoring the rest. But even if no newspaper can succeed entirely in cultivating the public that it imagines, it can still succeed to a greater or lesser degree—and Book World did succeed. Philistines are always declaring that no one reads literary criticism, but the record shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of book reviews. When the San Francisco Chronicle axed its stand-alone books section, in 2001, the paper’s editors were overwhelmed by an ensuing crush of vitriolic mail. “The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper,” one senior editor told Salon. If the outlet’s executive editor had “anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section, he wouldn’t have done it.” Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving step of never learning how to check the data myself, my editor told me that traffic increased in 2023 and 2024, even as the number of visitors to other sections of the paper was stagnating. Our clicks dropped off only after Jeff Bezos’s initial New York Post-ification of the opinion section, when he spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the paper to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
But to defend books coverage in these craven terms is already to concede too much. Popularity is not always a measure of merit, and, in any case, it is not static. What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as “readers” but as “consumers.” A consumer is a person whose preëxisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise.
In his own robotic recitation over the weekend, Bezos explained his logic for the cuts, such as it is. “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,” he said. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” The prospect of a paper that flatters its readers by regurgitating what they already click is familiar and depressing. It puts me in mind of Bezos’s other marquee product, another service that dealt a disastrous blow to books. On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all? ♦