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.
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!
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.
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"
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
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?
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.
Worlds collide. Jack is a hack. Literally. He does not review books in any meaningful capacity, he takes other people’s reviews and restates them. He doesn’t read most of the books. He is, unfortunately, the perfect example of a social media something. Entirely performative, zero substance. The article hand waves it away as online abuse (“Edwards is subject to copious online abuse”) but doesn’t interrogate it. Maybe, if he is so often accused of plagiarism and not reading books… there is something to it? You only need to actually watch his videos (and not these fawning articles) to realize the complete absence of any literary critique. There are thousands of thoughtful literary critics on TikTok and YouTube, it is sad to see Jack stealing their work and credit. He has great agents though.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
/pəˈθɛtɪk/
arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness.
"she looked so pathetic that I bent down to comfort her"
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?
(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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
Install uBlock Origin and you won't see any of that
uBlock doesn’t handle euro cookie banners by default
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"
Interesting. I'll try that out. Seems like a massively harder technical problem than just blocking ad domains.
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
Guys, this is an ad.
I wish we had more plurality. Not just convergence on one ultra influencer for books, but an ecosystem, with offerings tailored to audiences.
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
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.
What do you mean? Aren't there thousands of "booktok" influencers?
Worlds collide. Jack is a hack. Literally. He does not review books in any meaningful capacity, he takes other people’s reviews and restates them. He doesn’t read most of the books. He is, unfortunately, the perfect example of a social media something. Entirely performative, zero substance. The article hand waves it away as online abuse (“Edwards is subject to copious online abuse”) but doesn’t interrogate it. Maybe, if he is so often accused of plagiarism and not reading books… there is something to it? You only need to actually watch his videos (and not these fawning articles) to realize the complete absence of any literary critique. There are thousands of thoughtful literary critics on TikTok and YouTube, it is sad to see Jack stealing their work and credit. He has great agents though.
They said most powerful, not highest quality! These are very different things.
The majority of readers can and will conflate the two, celebrity worship, awards, and popularity contests are rife with similar mixups
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.
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.
I expected that to be a hit job but it's actually rather poignant.
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?
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.
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?
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.)
Backseat moderation is also against the guidelines.
It's always amusing that you cannot tell people this rule without in fact breaking it yourself.
Oh, the irony.
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.
influence ≠ powerful I admit if you are permanently only this might blend together.
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
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.
This is garbage clickbait that's unworthy of HN front page. I'm disappointed.
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.
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.