Trying to work out why "writer" is no longer a honorific to me. I think it's because it glorifies the medium over the message - but what are you writing 𝑓𝑜𝑟?

: The point of writing is to persuade; or to work out what you think; or to make someone feel something; or to backup your mental state; or how good it feels (flying, through thought); or to be alone in a socially acceptable way; or...

So saying you're "a writer" doesn't tell me enough about what you're actually doing, behind the image.

Similarly "book porn" and people with "book lover" serving as an identity. Fetishising the surface.

It's a mistake to mood-affiliate with all the different kinds of reading equally. What is it?: Closer contact with reality? An escape from it? Challenge? Validation? Duty? Dodging duty? Obediently working your way through a Canon? Rebelling against what your local authorities say?

instagram.com/explore/tags/boo

You could measure the arbitrary status boost given to books by comparing the critical reception of novels to films made of them.

(The Young Adult thing is the starkest drop, I bet.)

Here's a flawed starter method: take all books made into films.

Get $a =$ average of these books' scores, $b =$ average of those films' scores, $c =$ average of the young-adult subset books' scores, and $d =$ the average of the young-adult subset films' scores.

$b/a$ is the general book-to-film conversion loss.
$d/c - b/a$ is the specific young adult conversion loss.

(This doesn't decompose the book-status and commercial-pressure effects, you'd need natural experiments for that.)

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $\pi z^2 \times a$ jokes.

Use $ and $ for inline LaTeX, and $ and $ for display mode.