tldr; nobody pays for editors and more than automated proofreading anymore for any form of printed matter. Used to be worthwile that unintentional ambiguities and errors can be cleared up or left in, when at least a second pair of eyes goes over a text. This should help the reader not take anything away from the authors intent.

Two thoughts:

1) There's a lot of "This could be a stretch, but do jokes like this not risk further cementing the falsehoods peddled by right-wing outlets (controlled by the actual elite) that the university-educated view everyone else as inhuman?" sort of hedging here.

It's healthy to admit that a book written by a professor named Percival that is shortlisted for the Booker prize that critics are afraid or too blinded by groupthink to criticize (the thesis of this article) might be a product by and for the "actual elite."

-----

2) I think a lot of this is just cheapness. The "slop" paragraph near the end gets very close to that. One thing I've realized as an adult is how hard older 20th century books were edited - sometimes to the point that if you knew the details you might think the editor was more the author that the person with their name on the front of the book.

It was like the publishers used the authors' output as raw material for the product that they were going to sell. And while that editor likely didn't have much to say about the world, they knew how to polish something someone else had done until is was a professional, marketable product, like a music producer does.

In the days of monopoly and of fear of being locked out of access to monopolies, there's really no reason to put any effort into your output. You don't have any competitors to say it's garbage; you can announce it's a masterwork before anybody gets to read it and be assured that it will be announced a masterwork when released by people who have to make a living from access.

Also, an editor who can actually create a masterwork is hard to find, and has to be trained over many years in a meritocratic system by other editors who can create masterworks. That is far rarer now, and that makes it very expensive or hard to find for any price. The qualifications for getting into almost any industry now, but especially industries that have no objective metrics for success like the arts or other elite tastemaking, are who your parents are, who you know, and if you can support yourself in NYC for years without being paid while attending fancy parties and widening your social circle. This is a filter that eliminates talent almost completely, not one that generates it. Bonus: they'll also do the job almost for free - in fact, their parents might invest in your personal project.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> The Trees makes some extremely questionable decisions that I see as “macro typos” — thematic and stylistic mistakes made in haste that alter the appearance and feel of the entire text — which deflate its satirical power and social utility.

Defining "The author made creative choices I didn't like" as a typo is an impressively bold move.

> does it hold the potential to transform or positively alter readers

The point of satire isn't inspiring empathy, it's making people bigly buttmad. And the existence of this article demonstrates it's highly successful.

(Enjoy the ninjas, white boy.)

Arggg. Also the Then vs Than problem. And using Disclaimer when you mean Disclosure. And my damn phone switch out perfectly good words for a different work.

People who say "up" or "upped" instead of "rise" or "raise" or "rose". Straight to jail.

I won't comment on the subjective complaints, but those typos are indeed ridiculous. A human editor should catch most of those, an AI should catch all of them. A second edition of a novel shortlisted for Man Booker should not be released in that state. This is like merging PRs with obvious bugs that the AI code review will catch every single time, but deliberately choosing not to do AI code reviews.

I would like to posit that as grammar dies, we execute the apostrophe first. Somehow, despite the simple rule of “this is never EVER used to show plurality”, it is almost exclusively used for that these days.