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It is fun to watch the major media adjust to the thumping the election delivered. Last week the New York Times offered up some revealing though sharply limited mea culpas. The first piece, by creative writing instructor David Morris, argued in its headline that “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.”

Morris begins by recalling a ruckus that erupted in the publishing world back in 2022:

Male underrepresentation is an uncomfortable topic in a literary world otherwise highly attuned to such imbalances. In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking.

Maybe J.D. Vance was right at least that liberal cat ladies run our major fiction publishing houses. Morris adds some details from his own experience (which also undermines his statement above that the book world is “overwhelmingly white”):

Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.

I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female.

Morris wrings his hands for the next several paragraphs, admitting that “The marginalization of young men seems to have been a significant factor in this year’s presidential election. No voters were more committed to Mr. Trump than young white men — and he also did well with Hispanic men and continued to make gains with Black men.” But he never does have a cross word to say about the woke ideology behind these trends, i.e., the demonization of white males. Until that changes, publishing won’t change either.

Thought experiment: How do you think New York fiction publishing houses would respond today to the submission for American publication of any of the fiction works of C.S. Lewis (especially the male-heavy space trilogy), or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? I don’t think we need to guess. In fact the revived popularity of Lord of the Rings after the movie trilogy came out prompted the leftist culturati to rage that LoTR is both racist and sexist.

The other curious article was a guest essay by someone named Arnab Datta, a Washington lawyer with something called the Institute for Progress (sounds unpromising already), under the title “Climate Activists Need to Change Their Approach Under Trump.” Ya think?

I was hoping maybe there’d be some candid mea culpas about elevating someone like Greta Thunberg to international celebrity status (Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2019, recall), especially since Thunberg now likes to shout into microphone, “F— Israel, f— Germany,” etc.) Or the silly people who throw soup on paintings and glue themselves to roadways. But no. The article is a remarkably mealy-mouthed, and contains recommendations that will not move anyone inside the climate cult, such as:

To bring prices down, Democrats will need to be open to cutting down on the endless red tape and environmental analyses required by laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, which, while established to protect the environment, is now making the process of producing clean energy needlessly cumbersome and expensive. Large nonprofit organizations can (and regularly do) sue agencies if they fail to consider even the most marginal environmental impacts of new energy projects, dramatically increasing the amount of time it takes to build anything new. . .

We also need an approach to fossil fuels that moves beyond slogans like “keep it in the ground.” Attempts to punish the fossil fuel industry by limiting leases or permits for export facilities or blocking projects often backfire, creating price spikes with political backlash and price crashes that slow the clean energy transition.

There is zero chance environmental activist organizations will be open to permitting reform. Democrats who know it is a problem for their own agenda couldn’t get it done with Biden in the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress before 2022. The odd thing about this mild article is not so much its political cluelessness, but the fact that there is no comment thread for it that I can find. I’m guessing the NY Times editors were afraid of the reaction it would get from both sides.

More evidence that the major media are still suffering PTSD from the election. It is certainly fun to watch.

Chaser:

I’m still not tired of all the winning.