Scattered Thoughts on the State of Book Reviews

Last week, I wrote about “Criticism in the Age of AI” and tried to end on an optimistic note about arts criticism in general and book coverage specifically. This week, the discourse on that topic has been doom and gloom. Not because of anything AI-related, but because of the new New York piece, by Charlotte Klein, titled “Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?” The tl;dr is magazines continue to cut reviews of film, music, books, and other arts because they don’t help the bottom line: “Do reviews draw readers? Boost subscriptions? Sell ads? And if the answer is ‘no,’ how do reviews fit with both a publication’s identity and its quest to stay afloat?”