Just as ethics boils down to "What do you stand for?," or politics boils down to "Who do you stand with?," so the fundamental question of aesthetics is "What makes this worth my time?"

The Washington Post's recent mass layoffs (and the termination of the paper's useless publisher and chief executive, Will Lewis) included the elimination of the Book World section and that loss was the subject of a conversation on NPR's morning talk show, 1A. Noting that "there are more people that have walked on the moon than are writing about books full time," book critic Ron Charles stated that "Without book critics, what's left is marketing."

Strictly speaking, a book is not a commodity. It's a (supposedly) unique creative work that succeeds or fails on its own terms.

Lamenting the populist "distrust of earned authority" -- the certainty that one person's (ill-informed or uninformed) opinion is as good as anyone else's -- fellow critic Maureen Corrigan observed that reading books is, among other things, a bulwark against disinformation. Asked, What makes an effective book critic? (a question of great interest to me), Corrigan replied "You need to be open-minded; you need to write well yourself; and you need to read widely, and to know as much as possible."

These are not unattainable goals.

It's striking that neither Corrigan nor Charles enjoys panning badly-written books; they'd much rather single out books worth reading from the hundreds of thousands of titles published each year. But professional critics (now down to the five or so who still have their jobs) were often our best guides to fishing out the worthwhile releases in that relentless flood of literature. I sell books for a living and I need all the reliable help I can get.

On GoodReads, I quickly grew bored with the plot summaries and thumbs-up/thumbs-down consumer guide style of most comments; even worse were the squibs generated from one political pole or the other. I sometimes flatter myself that, at my best, I have something useful to say, but at least you can't mistake my writing for something an AI program regurgitated. That's what I miss about legacy media and its gatekeepers: it had standards of excellence. It kept us honest.