With this week’s announcement of massive cuts at The Washington Post, the paper’s Book World supplement earned a dismal distinction: It may be the only newspaper book-review section to have been killed twice. The first time was in 2009, when papers across the country were slashing books coverage in an attempt to stave off budgetary apocalypse. So when the Post relaunched Book World in 2022, readers and writers reacted with the same mixture of amazement and trepidation inspired by the dinosaurs at Jurassic Park. The rebirth of a dead species was wonderful to see, but how would it end?

Now we know. The new Book World was just as good as the old Book World; the editors and critics who lost their jobs this week, including John Williams, Ron Charles, and Becca Rothfeld, followed in the tradition of Jonathan Yardley and Michael Dirda, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning stalwarts. But quality had nothing to do with the decision to cut book reviews, just as it had nothing to do with cuts in the paper’s sports and international coverage. Rather, the Post was making the same business decision that most other publications have made. People don’t want to read book reviews—at least, not enough people to make publishing them worthwhile. It’s a vicious circle. As people feel less of a need to keep up with new books, they stop reading reviews; publications respond by cutting books coverage, so readers don’t hear about new books; as a result, they buy fewer books, which makes publications think they’re not worth covering.

As someone who has been writing book reviews for decades, including as a staff critic for several publications, this is a bitter pill to swallow. It’s tempting to react by blaming the decline of literature, of literacy, of society itself. And there’s plenty of evidence that those things are in fact declining.

Ashley Parker: The murder of The Washington Post

But the disappearance of the book review does not mean the end of criticism or of critics. There are still many places to read smart, insightful writing about books—starting with The Atlantic, of course. There are venerable magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, and newer ones such as The Metropolitan Review and The Point (where the Post’s Rothfeld published a review-essay just this week). The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal still have excellent weekly book sections. And there’s an embarrassment of riches on Substack, though you have to know where to look. If you tried to keep up with all of the good criticism out there, you’d have no time left for reading actual books.

-Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic