Not Recommended

What columnists have lost in the age of algorithms

- RUSSELL SMITH

LAST NOVEMBER, I stopped writing a regular column on art and culture for the Globe and Mail, my job for almost twenty years. Nobody noticed. I did not receive a single reader’s letter. I had a polite message from my section editor. He was sorry things didn’t work out and hoped we could stay in touch. The note contained no sense of symbolic occasion. I knew what I did was no longer important, either to the national culture or to the newspaper’s bottom line.

To be fair, my columns explored aesthetic topics newspapers typically avoided. I opted not to weigh in very often on big moral questions of race and gender. I didn’t cover Roman Polanski’s child-rape charges, for example, or Jian Ghomeshi’s trial for sexual assault. Instead, I steered readers toward controversies that weren’t headline news. I was drawn to the language used to discuss religion on Al Jazeera. I analyzed American Apparel’s “anti-brand” marketing campaigns. I dismissed pop music as the most conservative art form in existence. Creative tropes, I believed, were political in unpredictable ways and just as important to our intellectual landscape as the left/right punditry dailies usually traffic in. When Alice Walker published an antisemitic poem, I didn’t talk about antisemitism but instead explored the poem’s similarity — along with much new verse — to a Twitter thread.