This is not worth a whole article, but one of the craziest takes I’ve read in a long time was a Jacobin piece arguing that the decline of reading isn’t about streaming video but rather the nefarious influence of “the consolidated corporate publishing industry that made books pricier, more generic, and harder to find.”
I promise you, though, that it has never been cheaper to read classic works of literature. On your smartphone you can download the complete works of Jane Austen for $0.49 or get all of Shakespeare for $0.99. Public libraries still exist. In inflation-adjusted terms, hardcover books are much cheaper than they used to be. It’s true that the specific publishing genre of cheaply produced mass-market paperbacks has gone into decline, but that’s because (a) ebooks have displaced them as the lowest cost option and (b) as reading has declined there is less of a low-end market to serve.
The problem is that the exact same technology that has made it cheaper and easier than ever to access the classic works of literature has also made it easier to access a bottomless pit of content and there’s only so much time in the day.
As a reminder, some questions in this week’s Mailbag don’t have links because they come from readers who contributed to last November’s GiveDirectly fundraiser and are entitled to ask a must-answer question. Slow Boring will be doing the fundraiser again next month, so look out for that if you’d like to get in on the action.
David E: A few weeks ago you tweeted that you thought the public defender community had “lost the plot sometimes,” and quoted a case in which a public defender was arguing that the Second Amendment protected their client’s right to possess a gun. You have written before about the differing obligations of politicians (who must, by and large, cater to the public will) and activists (who must, when their cause is unpopular, seek to persuade the public that it is right). I understand you’re not an ethics lawyer, but how do you view the political role of public defenders or other actors who have obligations to particular individuals but may also have broader political goals?
My basic read of the public-defender situation is this. One of the core ideas of our criminal justice system is that providing zealous legal representation to each defendant, including the guilty ones, serves to protect the interests of the innocent. This principle extends to the indigent. In some ways it is particularly important for them.
So it is honorable and appropriate that there are people kicking the tires in every criminal prosecution, seeking to expose improperly obtained evidence or to impeach the credibility of law enforcement officials or to reveal the shortcomings of witness testimony or expert analysis. The existence of public defenders doing this work is an annoyance to the law enforcement apparatus and causes some problems, but it also prevents serious abuses.
My sense from looking at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and many other major public-defender operations in America, though, is that the ideological basis of the work has shifted.