This is my favorite discourse. It's so revealing. Because writers who don't read are precisely that: people who stand on soapboxes. They are not part of a conversation. They just want to speak over everyone else. They want fame, to have written. Not the actual writer's life.

The gutting of the Washington Post is an attack on institutional memory itself, and the disappearance of critics is silencing the interpreters of atrocity. If once, empire co-opted criticism to sustain itself, we are now in another phase. Witness and reportage itself is a crime.