Authority: Essays

Many worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical 2018 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself. Authority brings together sharp, illuminating essays on everything from musical theater to sci-fi novels, as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of personal essays first published in the magazine n+1. Throughout, Chu defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, charging fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with complacent humanism and modeling how the left might brave the culture wars with both its faculty of judgment and its sense of justice intact.

In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a fresh intellectual history of criticism’s crisis of authority, tracing the surprisingly political contours of the discipline from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. The desire to recover some lost authority, she argues, is neither new nor particularly freeing. Rather than being taken in by an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies over the state of our culture, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the actual crises, from climate change to rising authoritarianism, that confront us today.