"So, buy books at an estate sale, remove the dust jackets, then organize by color? Fire the podcaster and rehire your book reviewers."

Says a commenter at the WaPo article "The multiuse home space trend is coming for your dining room/A DIY dining library can create the perfect space for reading, crafting, work or dining with friends. Here’s how to get one."

The article is verbiage about putting bookshelves in the dining room. The author is Jolie Kerr. Was she a podcaster? I look it up. Wikipedia says:

Jolie Kerr (born 1976) is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.... Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called My Boyfriend Barfed 'the Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials...[a] wise and funny new book.' At NPR Linda Holmes praised Kerr as 'at her most irresistible when she's handling the kinds of awkward questions that do traditionally go unanswered in your women's magazines and your perky home-maintenance shows.... Kerr now hosts a podcast... called Ask A Clean Person.

I can see why WaPo wants a writer like that, but this books-in-the-dining room thing is pretty ridiculous, and it is upsetting that WaPo canned the book review.

See "The Death of Book World/What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers" (The New Yorker). 

The New Yorker article, from last month, is by Becca Rothfeld. It begins:

In April of 2023, when I was fresh out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy, I was hired as the nonfiction critic at the newly revived books section of the Washington Post. The shock to my system was immediate. In graduate school, where I studied aesthetics and German philosophy, I seldom came into contact with anyone who did anything else; even a brush with a classicist or the occasional stray Cartesian felt like something of a transgression. But the Post, it turned out, was much less siloed than the university. On my first day, I discovered that Books was seated next to Food....

Ha ha. I think we're talking about what long ago was called the "Women" section of the newspaper. Like cooking and cleaning and interior decoration, books are for women.

Unlike the specialized literary magazine and its informal cousin, the literary blog, the general-interest newspaper has a kind of noble rapacity, an encyclopedic ambition to wrap its arms around the whole of the world.... A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts....