We were delighted to have the chance to speak with Adam Szetela about his new book, That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.
Adam shares what he learned from authors, agents, and editors about the effects of cancel culture in the publishing industry. His behind-the-scenes account is fascinating and sobering in equal measure.
Show Notes
For more info on Adam Szetela, check out his website
Here is the official MIT Press link to Adam’s book
The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie audio clips come from her 2022 Reith Lecture on Free Speech (listen here; read the transcript here)
Matt Yglesias coined the term “The Great Awokening” in this 2019 Vox essay
“a rapid change in discourse and norms around social justice issues”: That’s a quote from Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, one of the nation’s foremost chroniclers of “The Great Awokening”
see Musa’s 2024 book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
here are two Banished episodes featuring Musa: You Can’t Be an Egalitarian Social Climber & Who Speaks the Language of Social Justice?
Michael Hobbes, “Don’t Fall for the ‘Cancel Culture Scam,’” HuffPo, July 10, 2020
This 2019 Zadie Smith essay from the New York Review of Books is the definitive rejoinder to the cultural critics who insist that we “should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like us’: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally”
On the controversy surrounding Amélie Wen Zhao’s Blood Heir, see Alexandra Alter, “She Pulled Her Debut Book When Critics Found It Racist. Now She Plans to Publish,” New York Times, April 29, 2019
On the cancelation of Kosoko Jackson’s book, A Place for Wolves, see Jennifer Senior, “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture,” New York Times, March 8, 2019
On the cancelation of a romance novel based on “criticism from readers over dialogue that some found racist or that praised Elon Musk,” see Alexandra Alter, “A Publisher Pulled a Romance Novel After Criticism From Early Readers,” New York Times, March 5, 2025
On the demographics of the people who work in the publishing industry, with an emphasis on racial diversity, see this 2022 report from Pen America, “Reading Between the Lines”
For more on literature and the culture wars, see Deborah Appleman’s incisive 2022 book, Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher’s Dilemma
On the perils of teaching literature from a narrow social justice lens, see “Poverty of the Imagination,” an essay we wrote a few years back in Arc Digital
On what we keep getting wrong about the cancel culture debate, see this September 26, 2025 Banished post
