“If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick
Is London really falling? Perhaps. This week on Keen On America, everything seems to be falling. There are young men falling from riverside apartments. Girlhood is falling to the commodification of appearance. Book reviewing is falling to AI. Mary Todd Lincoln fell through history as a shrill and inconvenient widow. And just three days ago, Yale historian Ian Shapiro argued that democracy itself has fallen — from the euphoric heights of 1989 to today’s nadir of illiberal populism.
One person who never falls is our unfailingly literate friend Bethanne Patrick — book critic at the Los Angeles Times, founder of #FridayReads, and the best-read lady in America. And her May list of recommended reads is full of books about falling. Take, for example, the New York Times bestselling London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe — a true crime whodunnit about Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old who reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch and fell to his death from a Thames-side luxury apartment. Then there’s Girls by Freya India on Gen Z and the commodification of girlhood; Make Believe by Mac Barnett, the Children’s Laureate, on storytelling as an art of raising kids; I Am Not a Robot by Joanna Stern on AI as useful tool, not a civilizational menace; and An Inconvenient Widow by Lois Romano which rehabilitates the already fallen Mary Todd Lincoln.
And then there’s the fall of book reviewing itself. Where have all the critics gone? New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote its obituary this week. But Bethanne Patrick hasn’t fallen. And, last I checked, London is still standing.
