221–230 of 293 posts
I've noticed this too. The recommendations I'm now getting from my audible account are full of newly-published titles promoting wokism and other morally and intellectually bankrupt junk rather than the classic titles I typically go for.
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It's free marketing -- or at least, a marketing amplifier. Sell enough books and you can get your name in front of a bunch more people. Those people at least know that other people are buying your book. That said, your link's observation that it's a curated list actually means that it is more of an accolade than merely sales. It means that somebody at the Times wanted the book on the list, which says more to its read…
On the other hand, if you can sell the "5,000 to 10,000 copies in a week" that is the supposed threshold for getting notice from the NY Times, do you really need help selling your book? Selling books gets you on the list, getting on the list sells books. Which is the bigger effect? Given the NY Times growing irrelivance in the market, the high-profile cases of having their list gamed more than once, their ongoing war…
I don't know how much that helped, but the underlying logic makes sense. He had a medium-sized niche audience, but their word of mouth wasn't going to sell a lot of extra copies. This put the book out on a world stage. And it just so happened that this particular book (a nerdy exploration of the politics of pre-Caesar Roman Republic) might appeal to the New York Times readership.
That's what the list could be for at its best: a mechanism for breaking out of your niche. I have no idea how many extra books it sold, but it was a meaningful mechanism for trying.
Ironically, this post is flagged.
Yep, it's messed up.
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> On June 6, 2020, Rowling retweeted an op-ed piece that discussed “people who menstruate,” apparently taking issue with the fact that the story did not use the word women. “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud? I'm still not convinced this is anti-trans. I mean it's reality so for people to want to cancel her over this is ridiculous…
This pulled quote, in isolation, might not be, sure. The question about this particular complaint is whether its meant exclusively or inclusively. Does a woman who has stopped menstruating stop being a woman? Is a woman who has never menstruated and never will, in fact, not a woman? What if these people feel in their person like women? How one reads Rowling's comment in light of these questions informs one's sense of…
Equally does a man who wears women's clothes make them a woman? I'm happy for them to call themselves a trans-woman, and "she", but we have to have language that separates the sexes at the biological level.
> What if these people feel in their person like women?
The word "feel" in this context is extremely woolly. This is how we have gotten ourselves into this ridiculous situation where no-one can agree on anything to do with gender / sexes.
> If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
So you might be partly right on this - but given her contribution to literacy and the arts and woman's rights we know she is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate person. Given all her positive contributions to society the hostile reaction from the trans-side is telling really.
> She went on to argue that Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to which she didn’t belong. Ooh, I just read Gurba's blog. Her argument in essence: a white author's inexperience with a culture leads to bad writing . Example from her blog: Mexican protagonist described by her husband as the smartest women he knows. But Mexican pr…
You may be right about Gurba, but you're dead wrong if you're trying to imply that the criticism of even just that book (to say nothing of the others mentioned in the article) was based only on the grounds of 'bad writing'. From the article: “I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book,” Groff wrote, noting that neither she nor the author were Mexican migrants. “In contemporary literary circles, there is a…
(I mean, maybe it makes books by white males so bland that nobody wants to read them, and so books by white males stop being the dominant narrative...)
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I know you are being sarcastic but if ants could communicate this is exactly what they will say. The movie represents nothing from their culture and makes shit up. The difference is minority people can fight back.
non-ants would get outraged on behalf of the ants.
I feel like this kind of argument only serves as distraction (not implying that's your intent). Do you not think ant culture would be absolutely offended by someone doing this?
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Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children. I’m personally glad that you’ve helped preserve these once-beloved cultural artifacts. However, I’d hope that anyone would hesitate to give these particular books to children in 2021.
It would be one thing if the publisher just stopped printing them. As pointed out in the article they were banned from eBay (a dubious honour achieved not even by Mein Kampf), and removed from libraries. In terms of giving these to children - I'd argue that this is the parent's decision to make and that there are far worse things we are seem to be ok exposing children to, like advertising or social media.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On June 6, 2020, Rowling retweeted an op-ed piece that discussed “people who menstruate,” apparently taking issue with the fact that the story did not use the word women. “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud? I'm still not convinced this is anti-trans. I mean it's reality so for people to want to cancel her over this is ridiculous…
This pulled quote, in isolation, might not be, sure. The question about this particular complaint is whether its meant exclusively or inclusively. Does a woman who has stopped menstruating stop being a woman? Is a woman who has never menstruated and never will, in fact, not a woman? What if these people feel in their person like women? How one reads Rowling's comment in light of these questions informs one's sense of…
I've noticed this too. The recommendations I'm now getting from my audible account are full of newly-published titles promoting wokism and other morally and intellectually bankrupt junk rather than the classic titles I typically go for.
Why is anything classifiable as "wokism" automatically morally and intellectually bankrupt junk? That sounds an awful lot like simply dismissing a broad category of opinions that may contain a reasonably moral/intellectual subset, much like the thing that wokism is being accused of right now.
But of the "wokism" stuff, 90% of it will be crap - morally and intellectually bankrupt junk.