[HN Gopher] World's most powerful literary critic is on TikTok
___________________________________________________________________
World's most powerful literary critic is on TikTok
Author : insistey
Score : 51 points
Date : 2026-01-25 06:06 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| dang wrote:
| I expected that to be a hit job but it's actually rather
| poignant.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| poignant?
|
| > His next major growth spurt came when his university career
| ended. When Oxford University rejected his master's application
| in 2020, Edwards posted a video of himself crying, entitled
| "oxford university rejected my masters application... (sorry
| this video is sad)". Social media rewards confession.
| Authenticity, sincerity and vulnerability were important - more
| important than orthodox intellectual baubles.
|
| It's literally pathetic. pathetic
| /p@'thetIk/ arousing pity, especially through
| vulnerability or sadness. "she looked so pathetic that
| I bent down to comfort her"
| tolerance wrote:
| Please don't post snark to HN threads. This is in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (I felt the same way when I read this paragraph and the one
| about Jack being a target of abuse but I couldn't resist an
| opportunity to 'dang' a 'dang' thread. At the same time it is
| touching how Jack has forged some semblance of a real world
| community out of this. I still can't take what he does
| serious as a whole and I'm not warm to the idea that the
| "World's most powerful literary critic is on _TikTok_ " and I
| do have a sort of apathy toward the cultural intrigue borne
| from people in their twenties today. Like dang I was
| expecting a hit piece and was no less impressed to find it
| the opposite--fluff. Both poignant in some ways and pathetic
| in most per my own sensibilities.)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Backseat moderation is also against the guidelines.
| sph wrote:
| Oh, the irony.
| Permit wrote:
| It's always amusing that you cannot tell people this rule
| without in fact breaking it yourself.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I really have a hard time understanding why people post
| videos of themselves crying. Maybe I'm already old in my 30s,
| but it's hard for me to wrap my head around it.
|
| Like, I get that at some level it's fishing for sympathy and
| pity, but your real friends are going to be there whether
| they have a video of you crying or not. Everyone else just...
| doesn't matter that much?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I disagree others don't matter that much. Attention means
| influence. If your tears garner attention, you prove your
| influence. Those seeking to influence to their benefit will
| see your proof and react accordingly.
| cdrini wrote:
| I think it's an interesting relationship between
| influencers, especially young ones, and their followers.
|
| Young influencers of this nature get a following because of
| their authenticity. They're genuine, honest, about their
| experiences, and the comments reflect it. People in the
| comments open up about their own problems and insecurities
| and issues. It creates an "illusion of community" as
| Edwards says in the article.
|
| Now couple with that the complication of making money. An
| influencer indirectly makes money from their followers. I
| could easily see how someone who makes that authenticity
| part of their brand/identity feeling an _obligation_ to
| their followers to continue to be honest even on subjects
| of high emotion. These people who are responsible for your
| success, your lifestyle, how could you be anything but
| brutally honest with them?
|
| And just like in real relationship where showing
| vulnerability can strengthen bonds, it has the same effect
| on the influencer-follower relationship -- despite in
| reality being parasocial. And strengthening that bond also
| results in more faithful followers, which is financially
| beneficial.
|
| Now, whether a given influencer is being vulnerable due to
| obligation or due to financial incentives, is unclear. For
| many it seems more obviously financial. But for others it
| does seem like a bit of a complicated mixture of the two.
|
| Edit: Here's the video in question:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8J8fWCNqCI . Personally
| this feels more genuine than financially motivated, but
| that's me. And to be fair there is no actual crying in the
| video! Seems like a bit of a dishonest wording by the
| author of the article to claim as such.
| bummy_commenter wrote:
| Echoing another commenter: poignant? Reading the article, for
| me it was poignant, only mildly, in the archaic sense of the
| word (sorry! But seriously--dystopian is the first word I'd
| use.)
|
| I'm interested in your interpretation and what you took away
| from reading that. Can you elaborate?
| cdrini wrote:
| For me it was poignant as the story of a young man who has
| for his entire life been keen on reading, writing, and
| communicating, who has in a way achieved what he was looking
| to achieve, and unknowingly created a set of shackles from
| his own success/fame that he's struggling to reason with and
| untangle. I can't imagine the pressure of loving to critique
| books, but then being slapped with labels like "#1 most read
| on GoodReads" . How could you make fun critique videos
| knowing that an honest negative critique could tank an
| author's career? It seems like a lot of pressure.
|
| His quote about internet "community" also especially struck
| me as poignant: "You have this illusion of community when
| we're really very alone." There are loads of young people who
| I imagine have an over-emphasis in their lives on online
| "community", and I really do think it is an illusion. I've
| been toying with the idea whether community can really even
| exist if you can't see each other in person.
|
| I'd be curious as to your interpretation that led to you
| finding the article poignant in the archaic sense (sharp or
| pungent in taste or smell) or dystopian.
| kubb wrote:
| I wish we had more plurality. Not just convergence on one ultra
| influencer for books, but an ecosystem, with offerings tailored
| to audiences.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| What do you mean? Aren't there thousands of "booktok"
| influencers?
| squidsoup wrote:
| If you're looking for literary criticism and exploration that's
| a bit more leftfield and nuanced, highly recommend Sam Pulham's
| video essays https://www.youtube.com/@SherdsTube - I've
| discovered some brilliant writers through him that I would
| otherwise never have encountered.
| wongarsu wrote:
| With a recommendation algorithm that shows you new content from
| various "literary critics", with an emphasis on a good
| exploration/exploitation tradeoff that shows you content from
| influencers you haven't seen before as well as familiar
| content? And maybe a reasonable system that allows content
| creators to reply to other creator's takes?
|
| That's TikTok
| swang wrote:
| I had to go through a cookie request, a subscribe to us popup and
| then had to close another popup telling me I could only read two
| articles.
| squigz wrote:
| Install uBlock Origin and you won't see any of that
| dmix wrote:
| uBlock doesn't handle euro cookie banners by default
| squigz wrote:
| Yeah, I think you have to enable a couple extra filter
| lists to get rid of cookie banners and some of the other
| annoying popups that aren't strictly "ads"
| terminalshort wrote:
| Interesting. I'll try that out. Seems like a massively
| harder technical problem than just blocking ad domains.
| squigz wrote:
| They filter based on HTML IDs/classes, so it doesn't
| catch every single thing, but it does catch most, and UBO
| offers an easy way of selecting ads/banners/etc and
| blocking them
| firtoz wrote:
| Prefix the whole url with `archive.is` e.g. `archive.is/https:/
| /www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2026/01/the-world...`
|
| This will work on most article sites to show you an archived
| version of it without any of these annoyances
| 3rodents wrote:
| [flagged]
| HPsquared wrote:
| They said most powerful, not highest quality! These are very
| different things.
| politelemon wrote:
| The majority of readers can and will conflate the two,
| celebrity worship, awards, and popularity contests are rife
| with similar mixups
| terespuwash wrote:
| I acknowledge his expertise in literature. I find his approach to
| non-fiction sometimes less insightful and note a recent shift
| toward following popular book trends but it's still great to see
| his videos.
| jalev wrote:
| I went and looked at the Tiktoks. As far as I can see from the
| few videos I've watched it's not so much "criticism" as "plot
| overview, small background details, and what I liked about it".
|
| It's kind of weird it's being framed as a tiktok sensation when
| there's nothing to really differenciate him from other
| booktokers? Other than perhaps more subscribers than usual.
|
| Also, per the article:
|
| > Edwards champions BookTok and also defends it...
|
| Kind of interesting to note given his video saying he doesn't
| like booktok books[1]. I suppose he knows not to piss in the pond
| he drinks from.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/AuEipfQbHrU
| publicdebates wrote:
| You misunderstand the nature of newspapers. Playing devil's
| advocate just a little here, I absolutely can see the financial
| benefit of an author taking a single epitome out of a group of
| near clones, even a random one among them at that, and placing
| him right on top of a pedestal positioned just before a podium.
| The more details the audience drowns in, no matter how
| truthful, the more you simply clutter your narrative with
| unfortunate facts and drown out _the whole point_. I 'm not
| saying the author is lying, nor advocating it. But sometimes a
| slice of the truth is more useful than the whole pi of it in a
| given moment for a given story.
| cdrini wrote:
| I've seen a few of his videos over the years and remembered
| them similarly to your description, but watching that video you
| linked to I think he does do a proper critique. Goes into what
| makes the writing weak, plot drag, links books to other books,
| and even has a deep understanding of an authors' body of works
| to be able to compare and provide insight.
|
| And in the beginning of the video he gives quite a lot of
| praise to BookTok, so I reckon the title is more tongue-in-
| cheek hyperbole, with a dash of clickbait!
| BoredPositron wrote:
| influence [?] powerful I admit if you are permanently only this
| might blend together.
| cdrini wrote:
| Second definition of power on Google: "the capacity or ability
| to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of
| events." Influence is a reasonable part of the definition.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Influence ~= power seems fine to me. Both measure your ability
| to change the world, and most mechanisms for power can be
| accurately described as influence
|
| The disconnect is that influence is not accurately measured in
| views. Peter Thiel is very influential despite barely
| maintaining his (known) social media accounts
| leoc wrote:
| How good is the book he successfully sold to HarperCollins, _The
| Uni-Verse_? Either he 's pretty good, or he was quite lucky, or
| he had some inside track.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Sort of an aside, but what's next now that Tiktok is _deeply_
| into end-stage enshittification? It 'd dead now, a formerly fun
| app morphed into grotesque eyeball milking system owned by one of
| the worst people on the planet. I deleted the app this week after
| the feed ramped ad content up to being an ad every other video,
| frequently with ads back to back to back.
|
| It's cooked.
| gammarator wrote:
| Evaporative cooling of the best content, likely, but plenty of
| social networks with worse ad loads still have plenty of users.
|
| My question is whether Ellison does to it what Elon did to X:
| revamp the algorithm to support his politics.
| boca_honey wrote:
| What's next is Sora and Sora-likes. The same thing but 100%
| created by AI. Tik Tok will probably move to that model
| eventually, kinda like Instagram pivoted to Stories.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| How interesting. I thought booktok was an aggregated list of the
| books people were most talking about on TikTok or something.
| Turns out it's just one guy making recommendations.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Guys, this is an ad.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| If you're not on TikTok yet, and are curious, just don't. Your
| life will be so much better if you just stay away.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Why are all these institutions so susceptible to bring led by so
| few people? Can't they figure out what books to get without being
| told?
| aaplok wrote:
| > Can't they figure out what books to get without being told?
|
| Probably not? People are not "being told" what to read, they
| are given some opinionated advice which they can then decide to
| follow or not.
|
| According to Wikipedia, 275,000 books are published each year
| in the US alone [0]. Most people (even excluding the many that
| don't read) will read well under 0.01% of that. Deciding which
| books to read without taking advice from someone more informed
| would not be optimal.
|
| Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to rely of expert advice
| than to just make all decisions on your own.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books
| released this year more than ones released before is
| baffling.
|
| Much like film you could say, but the backlog of books spread
| across millennia, not a century.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-25 23:01 UTC)