Section
Culture Industries
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Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
“The literary ecosystem is for every reader of every age. It is for every writer of every style.”
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What Is the Infrastructure of Critique?
The work of certain authors are infrastructuring critique: building new models of critique, which foreground how infrastructure is not just an object of concern, but a methodology for contemporary scholarship.
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Life inside the Fiction Factory: Dan Sinykin on Conglomerate Publishing
“An author’s photo is more appealing to the consumer than the publisher’s colophon.”
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Toward the Next Literary Mafia
Those excluded from the publishing industry can ultimately overwhelm its bigotry—if they all work together.
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Genre Juggernaut: Measuring “Romance”
For its scale and internal complexity alone, the literary genre of “romance” warrants more study than it has received.
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Twitter Ethics Swarm “Euphoria”
The most tweeted about show of the decade, “Euphoria” provoked viewers to gossip about its teenage characters. What did they say?
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What’s on Top of TikTok?
The videos of TikToks can easily reach billions. But because the app won’t share what’s popular, we don’t know just what the world is watching.
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We Want Our Catastrophe TV
“We can ask why Squid Game was so popular. But really we should be asking how any show becomes a global success at all.”
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What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award
We may never know what goes on in the rooms where literary prizes are decided, but thanks to data, we know exactly who was there.
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Queer Lives Are Not Side Quests
If you play a videogame and you avoided or never met a particular queer character, did they exist in the game for you?
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The View from the Fiction of the “New Yorker”
America’s premier literary magazine promises to offer a cosmopolitan view of the world beyond New York City. Does it deliver?
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How the “New York Times” Covers Black Writers
There has long been a fear that media only makes room for one Black writer at a time. But that’s always been difficult to prove—until now.
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What Counts as a Bestseller?
A fundamental truth about bestseller lists? They are not a neutral window into what the public is really reading.
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Are Spotify’s Vibes the End of Segregated Listening? (That’s Not What the Data Says.)
What kind of world does Spotify—through its algorithmic sorting of millions of users’ desires, through our aggregated listening—produce for us to hear?
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Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts
People who use audiobooks are expanding what reading is and can be. But they are also incentivizing publishers to change, in unexpected ways.
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Where Is All the Book Data?
Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide—to make culture more equitable—we need to decode that data for ourselves.
