Publishers Weekly, Literary Twitter, And The Problem With Online Rampartism

A strange and winding tale of a dysfunctional online norm

In late June, Publishers Weekly retracted one of its articles. Here’s how the present version of the page where the article used to live now reads in its entirety:

After review, Publishers Weekly has determined that this story about a book cancellation failed to meet our editorial standards. We have removed the story for two reasons: the failure to meet …