With this week's announcement of massive cuts at The Washington Post, the paper's Book World supplement earned a dismal distinction: It may be the only newspaper book-review section to have been killed twice. The first time was in 2009, when papers across the country were slashing books coverage in an attempt to stave off budgetary apocalypse. So when the Post relaunched Book World in 2022, readers and writers reacted with the same mixture of amazement and trepidation inspired by the dinosaurs at Jurassic Park. The rebirth of a dead species was wonderful to see, but how would it end' Now we know. The new Book World was just as good as the old Book World; the editors and critics who lost their jobs this week, including John Williams, Ron Charles, and Becca Rothfeld, followed in the tradition of Jonathan Yardley and Michael Dirda, the Post's Pulitzer Prize'winning stalwarts. But quality had nothing to do with the decision to cut book reviews, just as it had nothing to do with cuts in...
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