Senses Working Overtime

That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing by Adam Szetela. The MIT Press, 288 pages. 2025.

What does it mean to be called sensitive? Well, it depends if you’re being complimented as an empath or accused of being a snowflake. The descriptor can be traced to the eighteenth-century notion of “sensibility,” understood to refer to both emotional and sensory responsiveness. At the height of its European vogue, this sharpened capacity for feeling was celebrated. Novels and plays from the period are stuffed with decent heroes and compassionate heroines swooning, fainting, and bursting into tears. A delicate manner of address was also preferred. As Susanna Centlivre put it in the preface to her 1703 play Love’s Contrivance: “I took peculiar Care to dress my Thoughts in such a modest Stile, that it might not give Offence to any.”

Over the course of the century, “sensibility” was degraded to “sentimentality.” On both the revolutionary left and the conservative right, critics argue against the ethical superiority of emotional susceptibility. Moral principles, they maintain, should be rooted in reason rather than passion. “She sips a beverage sweetened with human blood, S,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his parody of a “fine lady” in the short-lived radical periodical The Watchman in 1796; the “human blood” refers to enslaved workers on sugar plantations. “Sensibility is not Benevolence. Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently prevents it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness.”

Today, criticism of sensitivity is almost entirely directed at liberal “snowflakes.” Rationality, meanwhile, is the province of the far more robust centrists and conservatives. This is the assumption underlying That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing by journalist and educator Adam Szetela. (As in the eighteenth century, the interplay between the aesthetic and the moral makes literary culture an arena of particular focus for the politicization of sensitivity.) The book is essentially a takedown of what Szetela brands the “Sensitivity Era”: a moral panic in the U.S. publishing industry over the alleged harmfulness, especially to children, of writing that does not conform to progressive values.

Szetela’s case is mostly stitched together from brouhahas on X—and their attendant write-ups in places like Vulture—over topics such as sensitivity readers, the #OwnVoices movement, diverse curriculums, bowdlerized children’s books, and morality clauses in book and media contracts. Szetela argues that the “Sensitivity Era” does more harm than good, for a range of often contradictory reasons: it makes people stupid and uncritical; it’s intellectually elitist; it ignores or distracts from real-world problems; it can be weaponized as a “wedge issue” to convert people to the right; it’s culturally imperialist; it coddles and panders; it’s just mean. “Above all,” he writes, with a posture of reasonableness, “That Book Is Dangerous! is a case for reading books. That one has to make a case for reading books should indicate the stakes of this moral panic.” The irony is that fretting over a state of censorship apparently worse than the “Cultural Revolution in China” is nothing if not a moral panic of its own.

Notably, Szetela claims not to be an anti-woke conservative but a progressive who wants to save the left from itself. And yet the ideas he engages with—“virtue signaling,” “PC and cancel culture” and so on—are pulled from that discourse which resists social and political change at all costs. At one stage Szetela explicitly acknowledges his intellectual debt to Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), a classic text of centrist liberalism that diagnoses a fatal culture of sensitivity on campuses across the country; the symptoms of disease include protests, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and Title IX laws. It’s an argument that has its roots in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s; see, for instance, Charles J. Sykes’s 1992 op-ed “The Ideology of Sensitivity,” published in the conservative magazine Imprimis. The U.S. educational system, Sykes bemoaned, was being transformed by “a new form of therapeutic politics” that prioritized feelings over facts—manifest as affirmative action programs and anti-discrimination policies. While Szetela’s anti-sensitivity screed is primarily aimed at the publishing industry, he does find space to scold trigger warnings in literature classes and schemes to diversify the curriculum: “Educators who cultivate psychological fragility are not helping anyone—least of all their students.”

Of course, trigger warnings are used not to remove challenging material but to prepare people for encountering it; expanding the canon is a literally additive, not subtractive, process. That Book Is Dangerous!, Szetela is actually convincing on the fallacies of #OwnVoices, a movement that began in 2015 as a hashtag to promote YA authors who share the “diverse” identities of their characters—part of a wider pushback against the appropriation of marginalized cultures. Szetela is right to call into question the “essentialist link between identity and an ‘authentic’ perspective,” which would assume, for instance, that one black person is able to speak for all black people. It’s not that white people are (rightly) discouraged from performing linguistic blackface but that the burden of representation falls on marginalized people. However, this is not a new argument—nor is it particularly controversial on the left (one of the sources Szetela draws on for his argument is Erasure, Percival Everett’s 2001 satire of racial stereotyping in the publishing industry).

Szetela does not mention this, but I suspect that part of the motive for his book was his own brush with online controversy. In 2019, he published “Black Lives Matter at Five,” an article critiquing the movement for prioritizing identity over class politics, in the academic journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. The article received significant pushback from other sociologists, who accused it of a “lack of intellectual rigor” and criticized its All Lives Matter-style logic. Five years later, Szetela does not seem to have suffered reputational damage. The critical tweets have nearly all been deleted or were posted by accounts that have been deleted, and the controversy is buried deep in Szetela’s search history. I am sure the experience was not pleasant for Szetela, but criticism, whether founded or unfounded, never is. Is it possible that Szetela is the one who is sensitive?

Much of what Szetela calls “hypersensitivity” or “cancel culture” could be given the less inflammatory label of “criticism.” Szetela, preempting this argument, states that “the cancelers are canceling the term ‘cancel culture.’” The evidence he marshals is hit and miss. I was bemused by his contention that “the snobs of the present tell you why Shakespeare is too ‘problematic’ to read.” Similarly unconvincing is the 2019 comment by Dan Franklin, former publisher of Jonathan Cape, who claimed that in the era of “#MeToo and social media” he’d never get Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita past his acquisition team. “Regrettably, a novel ranked by Time as one of the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923 will not make it past the slush pile today,” Szetela laments. But what is the basis for this hypothetical claim? As an anonymous editor responding to Franklin’s comments in the New Statesman pointed out, Nabokov submitted Lolita pseudonymously, anxious about its effect on his reputation, and was rejected by all the major U.S. publishers before being accepted by an avant-garde French press that published pornography. The author also lists several recent bestsellers that “have featured Lolita-esque relationships with no apparent adverse effect on their sales (the opposite, in fact).” All publicity is still good publicity.

Spinning off his article on BLM, Szetela argues that identity politics is a distraction from the more significant issue of class struggle in publishing. Szetela works very hard to frame the matter as a zero-sum game. He quotes extensively from the submission pages of agents and literary journals that omit the working class from their lists of “diverse” voices that they wish to hear from. But he leaves out evidence that contradicts his argument, as in his recounting of the “cancellation” in 2021 of a planned anthology entitled Against Ableism, where he fails to mention that a key criticism of the anthology was the lack of pay for contributors.

Over the course of That Book is Damgerous!, it becomes increasingly unclear whether Szetela thinks the left is actually sensitive. He invokes the term “moral entrepreneurship” to recast the work of anyone who makes money in a way that accords with progressive values as a cynical and capitalist endeavor. In this regard he makes no distinction between publishing CEOs, sensitivity readers, literature professors, and journalists. It’s true that most publishers (like most corporations) don’t care about people’s feelings; they care about risk management and their bottom line. But it is wildly sensationalist to claim that “sensitivity readers earn more per hour than public school teachers, daycare workers, bus drivers, firefighters, dentists, and doctors” and “can make between $156,000 and $312,000 per year”—a calculation founded on the possibility that these freelancers, often with highly niche areas of expertise, are bringing in forty hours of work per week. “Paychecks depend on new content,” writes Szetela. Could the same not be said of his book?

Whether it is real or manufactured, sensitivity over offensive language or tropes in literature constitutes for Szetela a false understanding of harm versus the actual harm of online harassment or censorship. It’s odd that one of the examples he cites is a 2020 TikTok trend of Harry Potter book burnings—primarily galvanized by her anti-trans lobbying. He refers to J. K. Rowling as “a punching bag for the moral crusade over literature,” even while acknowledging that the enduring popularity of her books with mainstream audiences has made her “one of the richest people in the world.” Perhaps Szetela is not aware that Rowling recently made use of this wealth to fund a successful legal challenge that resulted in a UK Supreme Court ruling excluding transgender women from the definition of a woman under the nation’s equality act. A boycott, in this case at least, is a rationally motivated choice—not “as hysterical as the Christian fundamentalists who burn Harry Potter books because they believe Rowling’s oeuvre promotes witchcraft and the occult.” The association of sensitivity with hysteria, by the way, was also common in misogynistically coded anti-sensibility discourse of the eighteenth century.

And yet, with no apparent sense of irony, Szetela is outraged by the insensitivity of the “Sensitivity Era.” (Of course, to be “sensitive” has a double meaning: to be acutely affected by things and to be acutely aware of how others might be affected. The latter does not always accompany the former.) He lambasts the “publicly shaming and humiliating” of authors and readers on social media and approvingly quotes from a column in Kirkus Reviews: “The methods of the Diversity Jedi are often not gentle.” I sympathize with the argument that people should be kinder to each other online. But it is important to maintain a distinction between bullying and robust critique—or even justifiable protest. Moreover, Szetela himself does not seem genuinely invested in gentleness as a mode, preferring a tone that might best be described as snide. Even the title of That Book Is Dangerous! drips with sarcasm. He describes a Twitter thread by an “award-winning YA author and professor of English” (he likes to list people’s credentials, presumably to avoid the charge of punching down) who thinks there are too many classic books on school curricula as a “public meltdown . . . too long and incoherent to quote in its entirety.” Of the “moral entrepreneur” for whom Szetela reserves perhaps the most vitriol, a historian and anti-racist activist: “The best thing to happen to Ibram X. Kendi’s career was George Floyd’s death.”

There is another account that Szetela could have written of books and the “Sensitivity Era.” Occasionally, he seems to recognize this, in a handful of brief asides that allude to the recent rise of right-wing book protests and bans. As PEN America has reported, public schools in the United States have seen nearly sixteen thousand conservative-driven book bans since 2021, “a number not seen since the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950s.” The texts targeted tend to deal with topics such as racism, LGBTQ+ issues, sex, and sexual violence—all issues that the left is apparently too sensitive about. Szetela’s justification for glossing over this matter is that “the right rarely devours its own. Moreover, their crusade has not made publishers bend at the knee.” Beyond outright censorship, he doesn’t once mention the protests, sometimes armed, targeting drag queen story hour children’s events nor the threats to library services across the country owing to the targeting of the Institute of Museums and Library Services by the current (and famously hypersensitive) administration. Surely this is the more relevant moral panic—as well as proof that sensitivity is not a political position but a more or less acknowledged part of what makes us all human.