Perhaps the days might return when Time and Newsweek felt some obligation to report on the same books covered in The New York Review of Books. They did, you know, once upon a time.

Well, no such luck. If the editors of Time and Newsweek do have a model for their cultural coverage, it seems to be People magazine.

So Scott McLemee is going to do his part to fix book coverage, one Thursday column at a time, at Inside Higher Ed. Good for him. If there's one endangered cultural phenomenon the blogosphere could revive, it's reasonably serious bookchat. An excellent example is Crooked Timber on Freakonomics.