“Goodbye, Pamela Paul,” was the headline of Andrea Long Chu’s now-iconic, recently ASME-nominated *New York Magazine* farewell to the former *NY Times Book Review* editor, when Paul left the paper two years ago. For a little background, Paul was named editor of the NYTBR in 2013 and took over books coverage for the entire paper in 2016, effectively becoming the most powerful editor in literary criticism. In 2022 she moved to the paper’s opinion pages to publish her own ideas about the world, many of which became political lightning rods in a publishing community that had for years been beholden to her editorial decisions. Particularly infamous was one explicitly anti-trans essay from July, 2022, which was widely criticized at the time. It also had many people wondering how Paul’s politics might have come into play in her decisions as the most important books editor in the world.…