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“Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time.

With over 50 million people worldwide identifying as influencers, and 2 million of them earning $100,000 or more annually according to Goldman Sachs, influencers have emerged as a transformative power in marketing.

For brands, micro-influencers present a compelling proposition. They are often eager to collaborate, less demanding than celebrities and more accessible. This dynamic allows brands to reach highly specific audiences while maintaining manageable campaign budgets.

When your brand aligns itself with an influencer, you’re aligning yourself with their voice and their content creativity abilities (and then hoping to grab some of their audience along the way).

But as social media expands its cultural dominance, the people who can steer the online conversation will have an upper hand in whatever niche they occupy — whether that’s media, politics, business or some other field.

In part because of their self-perceived outsider status, romance authors frequently see themselves as businesspeople as well as artists, responsible for their own survival and financial future. In contrast with fans of other genres who expect stars to drop a thick new novel every half decade or so, romance readers expect their favorite authors to... See more

The credibility of traditional reviewers came from expertise, experience, and the imprimatur of trusted publications. Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. Recently, I’ve been reaching out to critics—new and old—to find out what those rules are. For better and for worse, the adage... See more

The future is always being written at every moment, and hope and faith and even an irrational belief in literature’s primacy in and importance to the human prospect is the cure for despair.

Literature is fragile. It serves no obvious purpose. It does not feed us or clothe us or, unless you get very lucky, enrich us. But literature is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavor of humankind has ever been.