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The written word is, after all, the condition for the survival of these very same Platonic dialogues across two millenniums

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.

To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of A.I. companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to develop their linguistic mastery, and with it their most elementary powers of thought. This means they will lack the means to understand the world they live in or navigate it effectively.

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

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

But such a large audience’s benevolence — turbocharged by the tendencies of social media — stretches only so far before it curdles into something far more sinister: its own sort of conservatorship, with constraints dictated not by a judge, but by the whims of an online mob.

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.

“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.

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.