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.
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This will work on most article sites to show you an archived version of it without any of these annoyances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"
I wish we had more plurality. Not just convergence on one ultra influencer for books, but an ecosystem, with offerings tailored to audiences.
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.
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.
I expected that to be a hit job but it's actually rather poignant.
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.
pathetic
/pəˈθɛtɪk/
arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness.
"she looked so pathetic that I bent down to comfort her"I mean yeah? I'm pretty sure BookTok is a form of porn after I heard a friend describe it, which would make TFA like fanfic. Idk, there's this whole thing I'm calling "Darcy-Core" which isn't a real term but I don't have a better categorization.
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.
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.
influence ≠ powerful I admit if you are permanently only this might blend together.
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.