Who Gets to Edit Culture? Sensitivity Readers & Censorship in Book Publishing
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2026
⏱️ 91 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Publishing likes to imagine itself as a marketplace of ideas with a strong immune system: good arguments win, bad ones fade, and editors act as principled gatekeepers. In practice, it's also an industry with thin margins, status anxiety, and a constant fear of reputational damage.
Adam Szetela argues that a lot of what gets called "cancel culture" in books is better understood as risk management under social media conditions. Outrage compresses timelines, collapses context, and turns interpretation into a moral referendum. A handful of motivated actors can create the impression of a mass consensus—and once that perception takes hold, institutions often move first and ask questions later.
We talk about how "sensitivity reading" functions in this environment: sometimes as thoughtful critique, sometimes as a liability shield, and sometimes as a tool that quietly shifts a book's meaning toward whatever ideology currently feels safest. The result is a distributed system of incentives that nudges publishers toward caution, self-censorship, and blandness … while occasionally rewarding controversy because conflict drives attention.
This conversation doesn't treat every public criticism as illegitimate, or every publisher decision as cowardice. The point is to map the machinery: how reputations get threatened, how moral language expands, why apologies can backfire, and why the incentives often select for the loudest framing over the most accurate one.
Adam Szetela earned his PhD in English from the Department of Literatures at Cornell University. Before Cornell, he was a visiting fellow in the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. He writes for The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, and other publications. Among other places, his writing has been honored by the Society for Features Journalism. His new book is That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The purpose of literature was sort of to like reveal the human condition, to show aesthetic beauty. |
| 0:05.2 | And the way literature was taught, it was a very, a way of sort of like praising the best books of all |
| 0:10.7 | time. Today, that, and especially I'd say since like about the 1960s on, it's very much shifted |
| 0:17.3 | towards what's called a hermeneutics of critique or hermeneutics of suspicion. |
| 0:22.1 | And a lot of this is informed by Marxism and its various offshoots. |
| 0:26.1 | So the way literature is taught today is books are promoting oppressive ideologies, |
| 0:33.0 | whether it's along lines of race, sex, capitalism, |
| 0:36.4 | in the job of the literary critic, the professor |
| 0:38.7 | in the classroom and his students is to sort of like unpack those ideologies and then challenge |
| 0:44.2 | them. Audience capture effect is real, which is like, if you're someone who cares a lot about algorithms, |
| 0:49.8 | if you're someone who really cares a lot about retweets and likes, especially because that's your |
| 0:54.7 | whole income. Like, I don't think Candace Owens has another job aside from just creating content. |
| 0:59.1 | And you're seeing like, oh, when I, whatever, have a Holocaust denier on my podcast or I interview |
| 1:04.8 | Harvey Weinstein in prison, like that is doing way better than me just offering sort of like a |
| 1:10.4 | measured critique of an economic |
| 1:12.7 | policy, then yeah, I think consciously or not, you're going to be incentivized to do more of that. |
| 1:17.6 | People use change.org petitions now to get the attention of publishers and to get books |
| 1:22.4 | canceled. And especially in the past decade, there's been so many controversies of quite literally books being |
| 1:28.3 | canceled before publication, retracted from bookstores after publication. There's this whole new |
| 1:33.6 | profession of what's called sensitivity readers, people hire to edit books for potentially insensitive |
| 1:39.3 | material. So, you know, to say that there's literary freedom in mainstream literary culture, and by that, I mean, the big houses like Harper Collins, Hichet, Penguin Random House, you know, I think that's a tough case to be made. |
| 1:57.5 | All right, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. I'm your host, as always, Michael Shermer. |
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