You might have heard that there’s a big new Covid book out from Princeton University Press, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us that analyzes—soberly, of course, unlike all those other previous critical takes on the Covid phenomenon undertaken by less credentialed thinkers before them—some of the mistakes committed by the government in the course of the Covid crisis.

Its critiques are apparently so soberly judicious that the Boston Globe, one of the nation’s more reliable and unrepentant peddlers of government fantasies and lies on Covid, as well as a tireless wager of campaigns of disparagement and ostracization (right down to the level of the sports pages) of anyone who wouldn’t go along with the Fauci gospel, felt the inexorable need to devote a very long review to it.

They know, moreover, that in order to get ahead and stay there, one must stay within the established parameters of academic thinkable thought, which includes a code of professional courtesy that assumes that while fellow credentialed elites sometimes make mistakes, or work within deliberative systems that sometimes break down for no clearly identifiable reason, they can be assumed—unlike those less noble and dirtily partisan thinkers outside the academy—to be honestly working for the truth and the common good almost all the time.

And above all, they know that if they publish a book that is mildly critical of an establishment operation, but that does not come close in any way to digging down to the roots of the deep power dynamics that set it in motion, or examining the enormous seismic social devastation it caused, ethically compromised elite outfits like the Boston Globe, looking to suavely square the circle of their own moral perfidy, might pick it up and run with it, and that that might lead, in turn, to the highest honors an academic can ever receive: a fawning interview from NPR or the full-length feature in the NYT.