(The rule didn't end prop trading, far from it. The rule just formalized things and whacked Goldman a little bit)
From Public Books:
We are not the cultural consumers we used to be. Data, streaming, and Web 2.0 have remade how we read and how we watch. Platforms are the new publishers. But although we consume culture differently now, much of how we talk about and study it remains lodged in the analog world of the 20th century. It’s time for our methods to catch up with our objects. Born digital culture requires a born digital approach. Hacking the Culture Industries showcases the power of data-driven cultural criticism, and reinvigorates cultural studies for the 21st century. These five new essays move between book culture, streaming TV, social media, and online writing platforms: Squid Game and streaming hits; Goodreads and romance fiction; Twitter and hive-critique; Tik Tok and cultural attention; and who gets to decide who wins book prizes in the age of social networks. This series takes up a call we issued a year ago: to hack the culture industries. To challenge their dominance by using their data to study them and their stranglehold on cultural production. To tell new stories about culture in a time of ubiquitous data.
—Laura B. McGrath, Dan Sinykin, and Richard Jean So
Toni Morrison got snubbed. Or at least that’s what nearly 50 Black writers and critics suggested in an open letter in the New York Times after the 1987 National Book Award passed over Morrison’s Beloved for Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel, Paco’s Story. From the very moment it was announced in the grand ballroom of New York’s Hotel Pierre, the decision sent shock waves through the American literary scene. “You couldn’t have cut the collective astonishment with a machete,” Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post, “nor dislodged it with a thermonuclear explosion; that’s how startled were the assembled illuminati. Truman over Dewey was nothing as to Heinemann over Morrison.” Over at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani opened her review with just two words (reminiscent of another November upset, nearly three decades later): “What happened?”
....MUCH MORE
...Last spring, the Post45 Data Collective published the extensive work of Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, which includes information on winners and judges from nearly forty awards (worth $10,000 or more) between 1918 and 2020. Pairing this with data that we’ve gathered—on the demographics of fiction prize judges, winners, and finalists over the last 35 years—reveals broad trends about how the composition of prize juries influences the works and authors that they celebrate....
Back in 2017 I felt the need to disclaim any knowledge of one of the award world's biggies:
