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14 Book Instagrams to Follow if You Love Reading as Much as We Do

FYI, they're called "bookstagrams."

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If you... appreciate an expert opinion:

The New York Times is one of the most trusted authorities on the best and most popular of the literary world. With this account, you get exclusive daily reviews and recommendations from the esteemed publication's skilled book editors—along with revealing quotes from some of your favorite authors. (Think Alice Walker and Malala Yousfazi.)

@StrandBookstore

If you... adore a great indie bookstore:

Known as the largest independent bookshop in New York City, this woman-owned company always manages to feature recommendations that are both culturally aware and relevant. Take their Marie Kondo-inspired reads pictured here—or this collection of novels written by indigenous female authors.

@SubwayBookReview

If you... like book reviews from real people:

From New York City and D.C., to Chile and London, this account features readers from all around the world as they share the books they're reading on their commute.

@WellReadBlackGirl

If you ... love supporting authors of color:

A community dedicated to recognizing the work of women of color, Well Read Black Girl regularly posts book recommendations across various genres and inspiring quotes—all penned by Black female writers.

@BraveLiteraryWorld

If you... appreciate a good Instagram photo as much as you do a good book:

This account has stellar book recommendations, and the relaxing, aesthetically pleasing pictures of organized bookshelves, coffee cups, and charming shops will be a breath of fresh air for your feed.

@ThisGirlHasn0name

If you... have a weakness for fantasy and sci-fi: Not only does "the girl with no name" post flawlessly moody pics of her book collection, but from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter, her whimsical novel suggestions are a dream.

@BookishMadeleine

If you... are looking to find a friend in the bookstagram community:

With a combination of warm, inviting photos and captions with questions like, "What are some of your favorite bookstores?" and "What’s your favorite weather to read in?" Madeleine's comment section is a great place to interact with your fellow bibliophiles.

@ReesesBookClub

If you... would do anything Reese Witherspoon tells you to:

Since 2017, the actress has been sharing her love of literature with fans with monthly top story picks for "Reese's Book Club." Her latest choice? Susan Orlean's The Library Book. She's also highlighted The Last Mrs. Parrish , This Is How It Always Is , and Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows .

@ChronicleBooks

If you... want to brighten up your feed:

The independent San Francisco book publisher, Chronicle Books, consistently posts lively and colorful photos that always manage to brighten your day—and they're not always of books: sometimes they'll come with a side of toast and puppies.

@HotDudesReading

If you... like your books with a little eye candy :

It's clear to see where the priorities lie for Hot Dudes Reading's more than one million followers. Forget pretty pictures and reviews and just take a moment to enjoy the simple allure of an attractive guy glued to a book. And the cheeky captions don't hurt, either.

If you... need inspiration for your own book snaps: This profile's suggestions come with "a side of stuff" to go along with the featured novel's cover and theme, taking each story beyond its pages. (Plus, the geometrically organized layouts are a Type-A reader's dream.)

@elizabeth_sagan

If you... like to get creative with your book collection: Sagan's feed is filled with out-of-this-world imagery, all created with the help of a few hardbacks. From a unicorn to a Christmas tree and a rainbow, her photos transport you to another world—just like any good story could.

@penguinrandomhouse

If you... want to keep up with the publishing world: A part of one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, Penguin Random House has near-daily updates of the latest books added to their impressive lineup. Think Becoming , everything Danielle Steel, and Jodi Picoult's A Spark of Light.

@mybookfeatureaccount

If you ... c an't decide which bookstagram account you like best:

Co-run by Sagan, this account is a hub for all bookstagrammers, with photos from various profiles in the community, reposted for all to see. So if you're not exactly sure who to follow, this is the perfect place to find your favorite bookish pics.

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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Celebrating the 125th Anniversary of The New York Times Book Review

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Book Review, which Adolph S. Ochs established as a standalone supplement on Oct. 10, 1896. Read more in a note from Pamela Paul and Tina Jordan.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of The New York Times Book Review, which Adolph S. Ochs established as a standalone supplement on Oct. 10, 1896, shortly after he took over as publisher. The first issue, then called the Saturday Review of Books and Art, was eight pages long and featured news on the cover, including a story about Oscar Wilde’s travails in prison and another about the threat department stores posed to independent booksellers. We have been covering the world of books, authors and ideas ever since. Today, the Book Review remains the only freestanding newspaper book review in the country, a central component of The Times that distinguishes us from all our competitors and makes us the preeminent place for literary journalism in the country. That’s a lot to celebrate!

To mark this achievement, we are planning a year-long celebration that will culminate in a live October event, with a special print section commemorating the anniversary, and the publication of a book by Tina Jordan, deputy editor of the Book Review, that celebrates the Book Review’s storied history. Until then, you will find stories throughout the year highlighting archival gems combined with work from the most exciting literary authors working today. We begin with a piece that spotlights 25 great writers who have contributed to our pages , from H.G. Wells to Toni Morrison. In February we will look back at love stories over time and an essay by Parul Sehgal that examines and reassesses the critical legacy of The Times’s books coverage.

Each month, we’ll resurface some of the best, worst, funniest, strangest and most influential coverage from our pages in our digital report and on the back page of the Book Review. We’ll offer a dedicated segment to the anniversary in our weekly Book Review podcast (which is celebrating an anniversary of its own: 15 years in April, making it the longest-running podcast at The Times). You will see snippets of our past coverage highlighted on our social channels — Instagram, Twitter and Facebook — and in the Book Review newsletter every week. In other words, there will be a lot to read, but we couldn’t think of a better place for that particular activity than the Book Review.

As an editor’s note from 1897 points out, “Life is worth living because there are books.”

We look forward to celebrating the anniversary with all of you.

Pamela and Tina

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Pamela paul to oversee daily and sunday book coverage, jennifer szalai named new nonfiction critic, nyt book review publishes first art-themed issue.

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An Instagram Poet, a Billionaire and the End of the World

In Frankie Barnet’s novel, “Mood Swings,” two young women work to craft meaningful lives as society collapses around them.

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By Sarah Rose Etter

Sarah Rose Etter is the author, most recently, of “Ripe.”

MOOD SWINGS, by Frankie Barnet

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way language can flatten art. A novel must be blurbed and marketed, then categorized (“sad girl lit,” “tech novel,” “internet novel,” “workplace novel,” etc. ), to be sold . But doesn’t the reduction of an expansive work of art into a few words cheapen it — and allow us to ignore books we’ve decided “aren’t for us” based on their taglines?

While reading “Mood Swings,” Frankie Barnet’s ambitious and dynamic debut novel, I kept returning to that conflict between art and capitalism.

From the promotional copy of “Mood Swings”: “In a pre-apocalyptic world not unlike our own, a young Instagram poet starts an affair with a California billionaire who’s promised a time machine that will make everything normal again — whatever that means.”

I rolled my eyes. Oh, God .

How nice it is to be wrong.

The plot: Animals have revolted against humans, and the danger leaves everyone confined at home until a billionaire develops a sound that kills all of the planet’s nonhuman creatures. Afterward, there is a fierce divide between those who believe the extermination was murder and those who believe it was necessary. The fallout escalates, so the billionaire promises to fix everything via a time machine.

From the first page, the novel functions as a hypertext. Major world events unfold through the eyes of several intertwined characters, but we primarily follow two 20-something friends and roommates, Jenlena and Daphne. Jenlena is not beautiful, and she’s floundering through her life while writing Instagram poems. Daphne is beautiful, winning “real” poetry prizes and dating a canceled man. “They were not serious people,” Jenlena thinks.

Jenlena discovers she is pregnant. She gets an abortion, and that same day, the apartment she shares with Daphne burns down. Jenlena randomly meets the billionaire in a hotel bar and they begin a relationship. Meanwhile, both women interrogate whether the goals they’d set for their lives (getting degrees, getting promotions) still matter during the apocalypse.

If it sounds like a lot is happening in this novel, it is. “Mood Swings” is a master class in maximalism. The novel bombards the reader with a flurry of information: instant messages, news stories and even a drawing. We dip briefly and rapidly into the back story of each character. Overall, the effect is that of being inundated by a whirlwind of pop-up ads that you find yourself enjoying. By juxtaposing the collapse of the world alongside intimate character portraits, Barnet creates a novel where the personal runs alongside the political at every turn, and the two can never be separated.

The magic here is in the prose. Though the story itself is sprawling, Barnet’s writing is restrained and intentional. Moments that could turn saccharine are made meaningful by astute, almost insulting observations. “Every last person is either more or less beautiful than their mother,” a vivid section about Jenlena’s childhood begins. Another passage presents Jenlena’s wry musings on Uber: “Some girls wouldn’t even accept the ride if they didn’t like the look of a man, if he gave them a feeling. Anyone could rape them at any time. The danger was feared but also hotly anticipated as a rite of passage.” The novel is full of lines that shock in their simplicity.

Is “Mood Swings” a perfect novel? No, not exactly. The ending, for example, might not wrap up all of the narrative’s many threads, but I found the final scene to be a compelling resolution to the central friendship.

Yes, “Mood Swings” is a novel about tech moguls and the collapse of society. Yes, maybe it’s an “internet novel.” But it’s also so much more than that. And isn’t that lovely, to find a book that transcends its buzzwords? Isn’t it beautiful for a work of art to prove you wrong?

MOOD SWINGS | By Frankie Barnet | Astra House | 291 pp. | $26

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

As book bans have surged in Florida, the novelist Lauren Groff has opened a bookstore called The Lynx, a hub for author readings, book club gatherings and workshops , where banned titles are prominently displayed.

Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, in the categories of history, memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction and biography, which had two winners. Here’s a full list of the winners .

Montreal is a city as appealing for its beauty as for its shadows. Here, t he novelist Mona Awad recommends books  that are “both dreamy and uncompromising.”

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Kate Knibbs

There’s Nothing Revolutionary About Morning After the Revolution

In Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History , media entrepreneur and journalist Nellie Bowles fashions herself as a dissident chafing against orthodoxies in pursuit of truth. Despite her efforts, this posturing achieves a different effect: Bowles has produced a book hewing so wholly to her own movement’s shibboleths, it functions as a primer on “heterodox” groupthink, conforming to dogma rather than puncturing it. Readers who finish Morning After will, if nothing else, walk away knowing precisely what to say if they find themselves at a dinner party with Bill Maher.

Bowles argues that American politics “went berserk” in 2020 (a bold claim about a country that went through an actual Civil War, several presidential assassinations, and the year 1968), and her book is a compendium of reporting on moments she finds particularly indicative of this contemporary crack-up.

Morning After the Revolution focuses on a specific ideological slice of American berserk, so there’s no worry over issues like the rollback of abortion rights or book bans . Instead, it revisits the same subject matter frequently examined by The Free Press, the media outlet she founded with her wife, Bari Weiss, a few years ago after they left The New York Times: the excesses and inanities of what she calls the New Progressive moment.

This is not an inherently bad or unworthy topic for Bowles or any other journalist to tackle. Her basic thesis is correct: Progressives can be corny, sanctimonious, flat-out wrong, or all three at once. Sometimes, these blunders are funny. In fact, clowning on naive or hypocritical youth and protest movements is a time-honored and much-lauded writerly tradition. (One of the odder themes of this book is how insistent Bowles is that it’s difficult or unpopular to make fun of goofy leftists.)

Iconic touchstones of New Journalism, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , fall into this category. (Indeed, Weiss has described Bowles as the “love child” of Didion and Wolfe.)

Reading talented journalists interrogate and mock nascent cultural movements, even if one agrees with the principles espoused by those movements, can be great fun. Radical Chic , for example, is an acidic, vituperative takedown of well-intentioned limousine liberalism that details absurd exchanges at a fundraiser held by upper-crust Manhattanites Leonard and Felicia Bernstein on behalf of the Black Panther party. It is a classic for a reason, swaggering and hilarious. (A standout moment: when a young Barbara Walters asks if the Panthers really mean they want to get rid of rich people like her.) The Bernsteins—whose commitment to civil liberties was sincere—were devastated by Wolfe’s portrayal. That doesn’t make reading Radical Chic any less thrilling. One doesn’t need to find a writer morally correct to enjoy or appreciate their work, or to agree with a piece of nonfiction thesis whole cloth to find it valuable as literature, if the writing is good enough and the thinking is sharp.

Bowles has a talent for identifying forthrightly goofy Woke Mind Virus momentS, like when an organic cleaning product company announced that it supported defunding the police or when the multinational bank HSBC pitched itself to the queer community in an ad about how gender is “too fluid for borders.” They exemplify how an atmosphere in which people and organizations feel social pressure to endorse progressive values can result in hollow gestures from institutions and individuals alike.

Will Knight

Steven Levy

Scott Gilbertson

Brendan I. Koerner

At its most entertaining, Morning After the Revolution hoMes in on this hollowness. In a chapter where Bowles attends a multiday course called The Toxic Trends of Whiteness, where participants are encouraged to pillory each other for making inadvertently racist remarks, Bowles captures farcical details like being asked to massage her feet until she can physically feel the whiteness infecting each toe. (Afterward, the instructor tries to sell participants on an additional two-day workshop.)

However, the writing in Morning After is, too often, simply not good enough. Bowles strives for a wry affect, but the result is often flat or irritatingly blogger-voiced. She describes a police officer killing George Floyd as a person “doing what sure looks like a murder.”

Perhaps she could get away with it were the prose more entertaining—but as it stands, Bowles’ arguments often do not stand up to scrutiny, and there are no stylistic victories to distract from how muddled her theses are. “It sounded wild. It sounded pie in the sky. But cities actually passed resolutions to defund or, in some cases, abolish their police departments. It was all really happening,” she writes in a chapter on how absurd and damaging she finds the Defund the Police movement. It’s the opening of a section that suggests that American cities are increasingly crime-addled because the Defund movement led to drastic reductions in police presence. In it, Bowles describes how she became so terrified of crime while pregnant that she went to the store to buy a gun, implying that the progressive movement against police brutality has left her in a position where she has no choice but vigilantism. (She summarizes her view of the progressive argument as such: “The real white supremacy is not buying a gun.”)

The chapter is one of the book’s most revealing, because it elides facts in favor of a tidy narrative. Crime is a valid concern for Los Angelenos, now as it has been for the city’s entire history, but the premise that the protests in 2020 led to rapid reductions in law enforcement that then led to rapid spikes in violence and mayhem is fathoms too pat.

While some major cities in the US did reduce police spending, many others actually increased spending. No city abolished its police force in the wake of the 2020 protest movement. In Los Angeles, where Bowles describes herself as fretting about rapists jumping through the windows of her Echo Park home, the police budget increased more than 9 percent between 2019 and 2022. While the LAPD did shrink in size, it didn’t evaporate. Statewide, the drop in law enforcement staffing in 2021 was 2 percent, for example, which is noteworthy . (There have been concentrated recruitment efforts to bolster those numbers.) But it also makes Bowles describing how she pays for private security guards so she can “live as though there are police” come off as remarkably hyperbolic. Also: remarkably rude to the police!

Misleading anecdotes are threaded throughout the book. In its introduction, Bowles rattles off a list of silly repercussions of the New Progressivism. “Pepe le Pew was cut from the Space Jam movie for normalizing rape culture” she writes. This would, of course, be absurd—if it were true. The rumor that the horny cartoon skunk Pepe le Pew was deemed too problematic for the Space Jam sequel took off on social media in 2021, after New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote about how the Looney Tunes character, along with several other popular childhood cartoons of yore, was problematic. But as a Deadline report noted, Pepe le Pew’s scenes had actually been cut when the film changed directors, way before Blow’s column went viral. It’s easy to fact-check this kind of tidbit, and Bowles' opening her book with a fudged example like this speaks to Morning After ’s larger failing. It’s not the work of a skeptic slashing against convention. It’s a book meant to confirm biases rather than complicate them.

Morning After the Revolution hopscotches across familiar intellectual dark web talking points in this way, mashing flatly written first-person reporting with sloppily gathered factoids and blending until the narrative sounds plausible enough if you don’t stop to consult Google: DEI is stupid, “gender ideology” is a dangerous fad, calls to defund the police are naive, kids these days are too damn sensitive, asexuals are fake and just want attention. Any reader with even a glancing familiarity with these talking points need not read this book for new information. But this book is not meant, I suspect, to persuade the uncommitted. An enchiridion for an in-group, Morning After the Revolution is sure to comfort the already comfortable. It’s Chicken Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul .

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Nellie Bowles’s Failed Provocations

By Molly Fischer

The journalist Nellie Bowles writes a column called “TGIF” for the Free Press, a new media company she started with her wife, Bari Weiss. Both women previously worked at the New York Times : Bowles was a tech reporter, and Weiss was a right-leaning opinion writer and editor before resigning with an open letter lamenting that the paper was now ruled by a “mob” enforcing a “new orthodoxy.” The Free Press styles itself as an antidote to the woke excesses of mainstream institutions, and “TGIF” provides a weekly roundup of headlines on its pet concerns, garnished with Bowles’s jesting commentary. “I’m wearing my old Columbia sweatshirt and a Hamas headband—the look of the season,” one recent installment , covering the protests at her alma mater, begins.

When Joan Didion died , in December, 2021, “TGIF” included a tribute to her influence. Didion had “inspired a generation of young writers including this one” with work that “skewered the trendy movements around her,” Bowles wrote . “The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.”

With a new book called “ Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History ,” Bowles seems to be making a bid for Didion territory. Her title evokes “On the Morning After the Sixties,” Didion’s 1970 meditation on her fundamental alienation from the previous decade’s idealism. Weiss declared her wife “the lovechild of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion.”

Bowles’s subject in “Morning After the Revolution” is what she variously refers to as “the revolution,” “the movement,” and “the New Progressive”—more or less what Elon Musk would call “the woke-mind virus”—and she presents herself as an apostate of left-wing orthodoxy. “I owe a lot of my life to political progressivism,” she writes, of her evolution. “I bristled at the alternative, which certainly wouldn’t want me.” She volunteers bona fides:

I ran the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school, and I was the only out gay kid for a while, sticking rainbows all around campus. After college, I fit in well with the Brooklyn Left. I’ve been to a reading of The Nation writers at the Verso Books office, and, my God, I bought a tote. When Hillary Clinton was about to win, I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.

No inveterate outsider à la Didion, she was, if not a fellow-traveller of the revolution, at least a fellow-commuter, generally on board for her cohort’s quotidian habits and conventional wisdom. But she began to harbor doubts about its growing fervor, and the social opprobrium she experienced after meeting Weiss, “a known liberal dissident,” in 2018, exacerbated those doubts. She saw her peers in the media business adopting new jargon and publishing stories that identified potential racism in everything from Alzheimer’s drugs to organic food; she felt that questioning these developments was impermissible. Around 2020—amid the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the responses, both cultural and political, that each provoked, including Weiss’s resignation—things, in Bowles’s estimation, “went berserk.” When protesters established a police-free “autonomous zone” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that summer, she wanted to check it out, but colleagues discouraged her. Her reportorial instincts were being squelched, she felt. (She eventually made it to CHAZ , the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where she wrote a story on unhappy business owners.) In 2021, she left the Times , and set out to report a forbidden truth—that the left can be somewhat goofy. She writes, in the introduction to “Morning After the Revolution,” “The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are—I hate to say it—funny.”

No one who remembers the day that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wore kente-cloth stoles could argue that the past four years have lacked episodes of dazzling absurdity. Periods of social change come with shifting codes of behavior, exposing individual foibles and institutional ineptitude; people caught in the undertow of history flail revealingly. All this has made rich fodder for nonfiction prose since the days when the New Journalism took shape in the sixties and seventies, wielding novelistic detail and authorial subjectivity to capture that era’s tumult. Wolfe, the form’s self-appointed promoter, framed the New Journalism as a project of depicting status—minute gradations of subcultural hierarchy—long before anyone talked about “virtue signalling.” In “Radical Chic,” Wolfe crashes a party at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue penthouse thrown to benefit the Black Panthers; he describes the nut-covered Roquefort morsels circulated on trays, and also the special frisson of supporting a cause that, guests were warned, might not be tax deductible. His anthropological scrutiny of manners and ritual makes the scene indelible.

Didion’s writing on the counterculture circled an apocalyptic dread that lay beyond Wolfe’s status jockeying—but her own unsparing discernment sliced through cliché and attuned her to nuances of style and character. In a withering report on Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, she portrays its founder not as a vacuous-hippie stereotype but as “an interesting girl, who might have interested Henry James,” clad in Irish lace and serenely confident at a county-board meeting as she faces down her irritated neighbors. Didion and Wolfe brought skepticism to writing about their era’s would-be revolutionaries, but they also brought a novelist’s eye for character—a basic interest in understanding why human beings behave the way they do. Their critique rested on an acute perception of their subjects’ particular vanities.

Bowles is going for something similar. “I want you to see the New Progressive from their own perspective, not as a caricature,” she writes, near the beginning of her book. “Morning” starts with the protests in the summer of 2020 and follows a loosely chronological structure. She discusses privilege workshops and puberty blockers, the anti-racism guru Robin DiAngelo and the viral-recipe master Alison Roman, CHAZ in Seattle and the Echo Park homeless encampment in Los Angeles and the progressive former district attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.

It is difficult, though, to see Bowles’s subjects as more than caricatures when her descriptions of them are so generic. She writes that Seattle’s sixtysomething mayor has “hair perfectly blown out into the helmet that’s popular for successful women of that age.” Protesters in their teens and early twenties, meanwhile, possess “that coiled squirrely energy men have then.” At such moments, Bowles is not identifying and describing types; she is gesturing toward them, relying on readers to supply a portrait they already have in mind. Her characterization of emergent activist groups that collected donations and attention in 2020 and 2021 is similarly blank: they are “the flashiest new organizations with the best names and the sharpest websites,” or “cool, flashy nonprofits,” or “trendy groups”; in any case, they have “chic websites.” The incrementalist old-guard organizations have “basic websites.” What constitutes a flashy nonprofit, and, when you visit its Web site, what appears onscreen? Bowles doesn’t say. And “Morning After the Revolution” is a book that involves a good deal of staring at screens. Several set pieces—courses Bowles takes called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” and “Foundations of Somatic Abolitionism,” a panel for Times staffers on asexuality, a Columbia event on police abolition, all of which occurred online—amount to summaries of Webinars.

It’s not Bowles’s fault that events in 2020 and 2021 often happened via videoconference. But, for the reader, there is a dispiriting flatness to the results. Imagine “Radical Chic” with no penthouse, no eavesdropping, no combustible social chemistry, no outfits, no Roquefort morsels—just a transcript of unknown people, identified by a first name and maybe a hair style, addressing a group and saying cartoonish things. It’s a truism that humor dwells in specificity, and this principle works against Bowles’s efforts at bitingly observed social commentary. Instead, she resorts frequently to blunt-force sarcasm: according to the media, violent protesters are “good, very good”; according to clinicians, gender-dysphoric teens are “very wise.” She writes, “The movement makes new moral rules so fast that ‘brown-bag lunch’ and ‘trigger warning’ are actually bad now. You’re probably bad.”

You can picture a writer following up with her somatic-abolitionism classmates post-Zoom to discuss whether they have persisted in the practice (it involves humming and swaying), and fleshing out a sketch of who pays for such a class in the first place. But Bowles seems hesitant to engage personally or at length with the revolution’s foot soldiers. The people she speaks with instead tend to be the irritated neighbors, bewildered bystanders, disillusioned allies, proponents of moderate alternatives, and officials with talking points. The voice of the revolution comes from public statements, whether quoted in the media, posted on the Internet, or shouted at protests. The primary voices in a chapter on trans children (“Toddlers Know Who They Are”) are doctors and medical administrators whose quotes seem to come from lectures and videos available online.

Some figures whom Bowles considers (such as Tema Okun, the author of a widely circulated guide to “white supremacy culture”) decline to be interviewed. At demonstrations, protesters regard her warily and sometimes block her view of their activity with umbrellas. Bowles regards this as proving a point—that the revolutionaries are insular and refuse to talk to skeptics—and takes it as an excuse not to change their minds. Her account of a trans-rights protest leans on quoting things yelled by a person Bowles calls “Green Shorts,” who was wearing green shorts and yelling. Didion described herself as “bad at interviewing people”; still, she managed to sustain a level of intimacy with her subjects sufficient to get behind closed doors and see, say, a child on LSD (as in one famous scene in “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ”). “Writers are always selling somebody out,” Didion warned, but Bowles never gets close enough to expose anything sensitive to public view. You can’t sell out a stranger on the street.

In the absence of such fine-grained scrutiny, Bowles is left rehearsing the conservative commentariat’s greatest hits of left-wing piety run amok—stuff like the “progressive stack,” a method of prioritizing speakers based on their degree of oppression, which has found greater purchase as an anti-woke punching bag than as an actual practice. “It gets messy,” Bowles writes. “Would a white gay guy go ahead of a straight Asian man? Is a trans teenager more oppressed than someone in a wheelchair?” (“Think of the sticky moral quandaries,” the Times columnist Pamela Paul mused last month on the same subject. “Who is more oppressed, an older disabled white veteran or a young gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl?”)

Perhaps, given that Bowles counts herself a former member of the revolution’s social milieu, she’s reasoned that her voice represents it sufficiently. Yet even when discussing her own experiences she can be coy to the point of evasiveness, to the detriment of her credibility. “All the smart people are buying guns,” her chapter on police abolition begins. “That’s what I told myself waiting in line for one.” She never thought that she’d buy a gun, she writes—but she starts hearing about crime in her neighborhood, and then she finds out she’s pregnant. “Almost as soon as I peed on a stick, I got in the car and found myself holding an AR-15, getting a sense of the heft.” Would a shotgun or a pistol be better, she wonders, and where should she put a gun safe? Though she goes on to detail the brand of her home alarm system and the monthly cost of her neighborhood’s private security patrol, she never says what kind of gun she bought, if indeed she bought one.

The early pandemic was a time when countless people were trying to navigate the biggest disruption to American life since the Second World War, and they did it while peering into their phones, where brands, radicals, charlatans, eyewitnesses, experts, and hapless civilians all jumbled together in the same feeds. Bowles is not wrong—it’s funny that there was an interlude when the C.I.A. felt compelled to share a recruiting video touting intersectionality. Indeed, there is an abundance of material within easy reach: corporate lip service to racial justice, viral news stories, videos of lectures and street confrontations, provocations of all sorts on Twitter. Her book raises a question that Wolfe and Didion, working in the sixties and seventies, never had to face. How does a writer make use of such material in a way that takes into account the peculiar perspective—at once vividly proximate and remote—that online detritus affords?

It seems impossible to extricate the revolution that Bowles wants to describe from the context of social media—the realm of cancel-culture callouts, virtue signals, subcultural warrens at once noisy and arcane. (“Twitter has become [the Times ’] ultimate editor,” Weiss wrote in her resignation letter.) But, despite Bowles’s past reporting on tech culture, this isn’t an aspect of the period she ever brings into focus. The book just reflects, unexamined, an experience—hers—of being caught in the online slipstream. “The transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless,” she writes. “The movement simply pivoted: The conversation about racism was now about transphobia. Done! Go!” Maybe this was how it felt scrolling through Instagram at the time; on the page, it reads as incuriosity, even credulity. Surely a book premised on a united and overpowering new movement ought to offer some account of how the people, the institutions, and the ideas it encompasses came into concert. Lacking that, the main thing that B.L.M., pediatric gender clinics, and San Francisco NIMBY s appear to have in common is that they began to vex Bowles around the same time.

In “Morning After the Revolution,” Bowles writes dismissively that her reporting on Silicon Valley for the Times “fit right in” with the Trump-era resistance mind-set that prevailed at the paper. The revolution, she suggests, was happy to look askance at the tech-bro sexism and wacky élite fads that she was then covering. Bowles may feel that she’s moved on to bolder work now, but she found more texture and nuance in her reporting about tech than in anything that appears in her book. The stories she was writing just before the pandemic about screens and human connection have a prescient ambivalence: she conveyed both technology’s power as a lifeline and her own misgivings about what it might portend. But, around the time she remembers the world going berserk, something changed. “Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt,” she wrote , in spring of 2020—in retrospect, perhaps a touch ominously. “My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering.” ♦

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Michiko Kakutani Was the Most Feared Woman in Publishing. What Happened?

The former new york times book critic was known for her devastating pans. how did she get so bland.

It’s hard to explain just how much power Michiko Kakutani once seemed to have in publishing. The New York Times’ book critic from 1983 to 2017, Kakutani weighed in on every important novel, memoir, and nonfiction book, speaking with the institutional authority of the world’s most important newspaper. For most of her career there was no Goodreads, no BookTok, no Amazon. For the Manhattan-centric publishing industry, Kakutani’s was the voice that rang the loudest.

A Times reporter elevated to the critic’s chair at 28, she often seemed to approach the job of book reviewing as a reportorial one: She took great notes, she assembled them smartly, and she moved on to the next story. Kakutani did seem to take seriously the reviewer’s role as consumer guide. “My job as a critic was to give honest evaluations of new books and to try to explain why I thought they were worth reading —or not,” she said after she left the paper. She didn’t shy away from the question that some critics find oversimplified, or even demeaning: Well, was it good?

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There were times that a rave from her seemed to make a writer’s career: Mary Karr, for example, said that Kakutani’s laudatory review of her memoir The Liars’ Club felt “like having the good fairy touch you on your shoulder with her wand.” But what people mostly remember about Kakutani were her pans. She was, to her credit, fearless in print—indeed, seemed to take special delight in cutting literary lions down to size. With richly deserved hatchet job after richly deserved hatchet job, she drove Norman Mailer to distraction, such that he finally responded with a racist rant. Other writers took it on the chin with a little more grace. Nicholson Baker joked that reading her review of A Box of Matches was “like having my liver taken out without anesthesia.” Lorrie Moore once slyly remarked that “a writer friend” likes to lean over babies’ bassinets and bless them thus: “May you never be reviewed by Michiko Kakutani.”

Rereading those pans now, they often feel arbitrary and not argued with any particular verve. Kakutani’s response to an author’s career often followed a recognizable pattern, which Margaret Atwood described as “praising you one time, and then nuking you the next, just so you don’t get complacent.” You can see this pattern in Kakutani’s treatment of Zadie Smith, whose 2000 debut, White Teeth , certainly benefited from Kakutani’s plaudits . Two years later, Kakutani seemingly couldn’t wait to compare the follow-up, The Autograph Man , unfavorably: It was “dour where White Teeth was exuberant; abstract and pompous where White Teeth was brightly satiric; tight and preachy where White Teeth was expansive.” On Beauty , three years later? “After the weirdly sodden detour she took with her last novel … Ms. Smith has written a wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed follow-up to her dazzling 2000 novel White Teeth .”

And she could keep it up for decades! NW in 2012 : “Like her disappointing second novel, The Autograph Man , NW and its paper-doll-like characters do a disservice to this hugely talented author.” Finally, in 2016, she seemed to exhaust herself, declaring Swing Time half good, half bad. The actual truth is that all these books are pretty good, and a more interesting critic, a more stylish one, might have found fruitful terrain in writing about the very different goals Smith had set herself and the ways in which those goals followed or bucked against certain trends in the fiction of the day.

But style was not the point for Kakutani. When she wasn’t impersonating a creaky fictional character , her reviews were more or less voiceless, substituting bland tics (like her much-mocked dependence on the word limn ) for crackling prose. Or perhaps a better way to say it is that her only voice was authority, the Timesian declaration of critical judgment. She never wrestled with a book, not publicly, unlike many of the critics who have followed her at the Times. She delivered her reviews with the serene assurance of the always-right, secure in her belief that she could even see into writers’ hearts to see just how deeply they were feeling.

Though she was a Pulitzer-winning star in an age when critics could still be stars, she didn’t act like one. She avoided the literary party circuit and shared so little about her life that a publicist once cracked, “We know more about J.D. Salinger.” Such was the mystery surrounding her that a rumor spread that she had dated Woody Allen, based seemingly on nothing but the fact that she interviewed him at Elaine’s and the results ended up in the Paris Review. In 1999 the new satirical website McSweeney’s had one of its first big hits with a gag essay by a white guy titled “ I Am Michiko Kakutani .” Even recently, the comedian Bowen Yang, searching for a surprising Asian character to portray in his Saturday Night Live audition, chose Kakutani , and created a larger-than-life monster to play off her shy, reclusive image.

And then, in 2017, she took a buyout and departed the Times. She’s returned to the paper now and then, mostly to write about owls , but at age 69 she’s carved out an unlikely second career as an author—not primarily of literary criticism, though she did release one of those “books to read before you die ”–type deals, the 401(k) of the retired reviewer. Kakutani’s real passion seems to be for diagnosing our modern maladies, serving as an anti-Trump chronicler of our era’s absurdities, first in 2018’s bestselling The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump and now with The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider .

Why has a respected and feared book critic turned to writing books, and particularly these kinds of books? Why does Michiko Kakutani want to be David Brooks, or Yuval Noah Harari, synthesizing potted history and the Way We Live Now between the pages of hardcovers? And … well … is it good?

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

By Michiko Kakutani. Crown.

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The Great Wave takes as its cover image and central metaphor Hokusai’s 1831 woodblock print of a stormy sea framing a distant Mount Fuji. “The great wave of change breaking over today’s world,” Kakutani writes in the book’s introduction, “is sweeping away old certainties and assumptions and creating an inflection point of both opportunity and danger.” But if you’re not feeling that metaphor, she’s got others! That introduction is rich with buzzwords meant to drive home the unique nature of our contemporary problem: In addition to the aquatic imagery, Kakutani mentions “the military acronym VUCA” (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), “the butterfly effect,” “future shock,” and “adaptive breakdown.” In one paragraph she name-drops Trump, COVID, income inequality, and artificial intelligence, then adds that “looming over all of this, like Godzilla, is the dark cloud of climate change.”

Kakutani declares the 2020s a “hinge moment” in world history, and describes other such inflection points: the late Middle Ages, the end of the Gilded Age, the years between the world wars. These pages have the feel of a helpful teacher skimming through the textbook for our benefit, but even the most casual reader of history will find herself unsurprised by Kakutani’s glosses on complex moments of change. Oh, word? The Spanish flu compounded the already tectonic changes wrought by industrialization? You don’t say.

The chaos of those eras, Kakutani suggests, is suggestive of the chaos through which we’re all living now. But in attempting to limn that chaos, Kakutani reveals the shortcomings of synthesis. It simply is beyond her abilities to evoke the modern era with any kind of individual, creative language. All she has are references, and all her references are basic as hell. “It’s difficult to convey just how strange life in the third decade of the third millennium has become,” she posits. “It often feels like a preposterous mash-up of political satire, disaster movie, reality show, and horror film tropes all at once.” She laments that 2024 feels less like the future of The Jetsons and more like the future of Black Mirror .

In later chapters, as Kakutani explores the current cultural landscape, she name-drops plenty of interesting writers, musicians, and artists, from Kendrick Lamar to Jackie Sibblies Drury to Bad Bunny to “the remarkable Bowen Yang.” (I sincerely hope someone sent her a tape of his audition.) She includes a list of “first- and second-generation immigrants” whose work defines the modern literary landscape, which is only slightly updated from a list she gave the Guardian in 2020. She runs through such famous American “heroic outsiders” as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca , Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (?), and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator (?!).

It’s all a gloss, that is to say, names cherry-picked to support trend-piece-level arguments about the evolution of culture. “Around the same time that graphic novels and manga were going mainstream, there was a surge of interest in fantasy and science fiction,” she writes confidently, tossing out, as examples, the very obviously unrelated phenomena of Star Wars and Maus . Any number of critics I know would be surprised to read her conclusion that unlike the metafictional novelists of the 1970s or the miniaturists of the 1980s, “the twenty-first century’s most influential artists tend to look outward toward the world at large and the unfurling vistas of history.” Yes, I thought, nodding—that’s why they call the most notable literary movement of the past 10 years auto fiction, because it’s looking aut ward.

The buzzwords, jargon, and tired cultural references reach their apogee in Kakutani’s chapter headings, which read like baroque PowerPoint slides for an undergraduate survey course about all the shit we’re already thinking about every minute of every day. I simply cannot decide which of these induced in me the deepest, most soul-weary shudder. I think it’s a three-way tie, between

There’s a role for books like this, I understand. The Great Wave will likely join other such flight-length skims on airport-bookstore display tables, offering 190 pages of synthetic, Resistance-y culture crit with a hint of literary flair—Thomas Friedman for people who like Pynchon. But it’s so impersonal, so disheartening, barely a book at all, really. Michiko Kakutani, expert reviewer, has reviewed the past 10 years. She’s read everything there is to read on the internet, and taken extensive notes, and now she’s delivering her take. Well, was it good? No—it was bad.