stars & AI

the urge to xerox a one of a kind

Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored (1931)

The byline is, as these things go, a recent innovation. When Virginia Woolf wrote her reviews for the TLS, you knew who wrote them if you were “in the loop”—but they were unsigned. It was only in 1974 that names started appearing next to reviews in that particular paper. The TLS was perhaps unusually resistant to this change in journalistic practices, but you can track a similar change over the pages of the New York Times. These days, not only would it be deeply strange for a publication to launch without any bylines at all, but entire publications here on Substack are more or less supported on the strength of a single person’s name and sensibility.¹

Truthfully, I’m not sure that I think the byline was a great innovation for writers. In fact, it would be interesting to see a publication to do entirely without them. But much like not reviewing books by your friends—another pretty recent journalistic practice that has not, in my opinion, made book rev…