America’s Read Guards

Every moral panic appears as a fait accompli from the inside and inexplicable from the outside. The magistrates of Salem required nothing beyond spectral evidence to hang nineteen of their neighbors, and within five years the colony’s own ministers were ashamed of the proceedings. In 1954 the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham persuaded a Senate subcommittee that comic books were manufacturing juvenile delinquents, and a terrified industry adopted a Comics Code that gutted the medium for a generation; by the time the Code was quietly abandoned, no one could explain why anyone had believed him. The pattern recurs with a regularity that should comfort no one. An anxiety finds an object, merchants of outrage organize the anxiety into a movement, and institutions that ought to know better capitulate. Then, with a swiftness that embarrasses every participant, the apparatus collapses, and the historians move in.

The historians are now moving in on American publishing. Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! is the fullest account yet written of the moral panic that gripped the industry between roughly 2016 and 2024, when accusations of racism, cultural appropriation, and insufficient sensitivity came to determine what Americans were permitted to write, publish, and read. The book is a rigorous and genuinely illuminating anatomy of that episode.

Szetela writes as an insider of the world he indicts. He earned his doctorate in English at Cornell, held a visiting fellowship at Harvard, and contributes to the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Newsweek. The book grew out of his dissertation, and it retains the dissertation’s virtues: the research is deep, the interviews extensive, and the prose free of jargon. He spoke with presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, senior literary agents, executive directors of public library districts, award-winning authors, editors, marketers, and the sensitivity readers themselves. The admission he heard most often from these people—“I wouldn’t have done this interview if it wasn’t anonymous”—belongs to both the book’s acknowledgments and argument. The censor of Szetela’s account is not a government office. It is a diffuse apparatus in which anyone with an internet connection may serve as a commissar, and in which the fear of that apparatus does most of the enforcement.