A review of some books left in a cardboard box on the street for anyone to take, and the zeitgeist of which it speaks

They’re giving up some of the comfort of authority, is the first thing we’re noticing. Discarding Civics must speak to whatever lessons we take from the election, whether civics is dead now as a result, or whether the corpse was already stinking and elected Trump in its stench. If this is participating in democracy, then let it go, says the discarder. That “the multicultural” is “popular,” well, hard to feel that way now.

We must also give up the comfort of imagining that authoritative knowledge of the world will help us navigate it. The dictionary, of course, the one-volume account of every word you need, that’s gone, but also giving up Stats: Modeling the World, that’s a sign that not merely language but also numbers have failed us. Quantitative, Qualitative, and mixed, all gone. And why not? One of the numbers is its edition, the third edition that was published in 2009 and which has, by 2024, been superseded by 3 more editions. What point is there in modeling the world, if it just keeps upgrading? What point of a dictionary, if they just keep making new words?

Webster’s New World Dictionary was published in 1951, back when America was great, and while it wasn’t the direct descendent of Noah Webster’s actual dictionary—”the work is unrelated to the series of Webster’s dictionaries published by the Merriam-Webster Company, which indeed are descended directly from Noah Webster’s original publications” as Wikipedia tells us—it was that most new world of things, a fraud become authoritative. An attempt to capture some of the aura of the man whose name is sufficiently synonymous with American dictionaries as to just get slapped on there, just because it happens to be a dictionary, and American, and then, in the end, it became the standard dictionary used by a variety of news organizations. And then, the times changed: the AP switched to Merriam-Webster in 2024.

What good is knowledge, they must have asked, when they cast these books out? Knowledge was what got Adam and Eve cast out too. Because it doesn’t always help. You can counsel, you can help, professionally. But the promise that this will be “the relied-upon, essential resource for students in any helping field,” and “the book many students return to well into their professional careers” hasn’t borne fruit, has it? Or has it borne the kind of fruit that gets you pushed out as fast as a 10^th edition text when the 11^th edition comes out? The second edition of Counseling Research, too, has no place in a world that contains the third edition. Time just makes fools of us all.