WSJ, July 1, 2023

choi

(1) Ben Kesling, Veterans Worsen Recruitment Crisis; Military families steer young people away from enlisting, threatening strength. Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2023, at page A1
("Today, nearly 80% of all new Army recruits have a family member who has served in uniform, according to the service")

Excerpt in the window of print: A veteran said she would make sure her kids never enter the military.


Note:
(a) service (n): "6 b : one of a nation's military forces (such as the army or navy)"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/service

In other words, the last clause means: according to army.
(b) The excerpt explains the title. I only glance at the article, but do not think much of the dip of last year in recruitment.


(2) Daniel Akst, Skyhorse Publishing, the House of the Canceled; An old-fashioned liberal, Tony Lyons welcomes authors from Woody Allen to Alex Jones and topics from 2020 election fraud to a defense of Venezuela. Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2023, at page A11 (in the weekly column "The Weekend Interview" with Tony Lyons)
j.com/articles/skyhorse-publishing-the-house-of-the-canceled-tony-lyons-books-heterodoxy-manuscript-d7b57992j.com/articles/skyhorse-publishing-the-house-of-the-canceled-tony-lyons-books-heterodoxy-manuscript-d7b57992

Note:
(a) The English surnames Lyon or its variant Lyons is from personal name of the same spelling: "Middle English Lyon Old French Leon (from Latin leo lion or the cognate Greek leōn)."
(b) "Just four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a panel of literary luminaries awarded the newly established Bollingen Prize for the best volume of American poetry to 'The Pisan Cantos.'  The author, Ezra Pound, had spent the war in Italy broadcasting Fascist propaganda."
(i) Pisan is an adjective of the proper name Pisa.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pisa
(ii) The Cantos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos
("The section he wrote at the end of World War II, a composition started while he was interned by American occupying forces in Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos, and is the part of the work most often considered to be self-sufficient. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1948")

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                                        New York
Just four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a panel of literary luminaries awarded the newly established Bollingen Prize for the best volume of American poetry to “The Pisan Cantos.”

The author, Ezra Pound, had spent the war in Italy broadcasting Fascist propaganda. Pound’s raw anti-Semitism was a feature of his radio work, and the prize-winning cantos begin with a lamentation for Mussolini. But the book was published anyway, and the Bollingen judges insisted that to allow anything other than “poetic achievement” to influence their decision “would destroy the significance of the award.”

Attacks on the selection were plenty, and the judges might have found a better choice under the circumstances. But their steadfast defense of such a controversial selection is a measure of the distance we have traveled since. Nowadays, unorthodox views, departures from one’s ethnic “lane,” forbidden language or the taint of accusation can render a manuscript or author unpublishable. Elizabeth Gilbert stopped the release of her own latest novel simply because it was set in Russia. This climate of timidity creates a niche for publishers willing to buck the dominant culture. Some, like Regnery Publishing and Encounter Books, cater specifically to conservative authors and readers. Then there’s Skyhorse Publishing, which is truly heterodox.

President and publisher Tony Lyons aims to widen the Overton window—the range of ideas that can be discussed—which he considers intolerably narrowed by an unholy alliance of government, media, academics and corporations. His embrace of controversial manuscripts has its costs: It has made enemies of old friends, made it harder to find employees in the ideological monoculture of New York publishing, and brought pressure on his distributor, Simon & Schuster, which has stood by him.

A bearded, fit 60-year-old in a black T-shirt, Mr. Lyons speaks at length about these issues over coffee at New York’s Soho House, a fashionable downtown social club whose denizens might have been dismayed if they overheard our conversation. “If you’re stifling dissent,” he says, “then it’s not just freedom of speech that we’re losing, it’s democracy that we’re losing.

Mr. Lyons grew up in a liberal household on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He recalls with pride that discussion and dissent were dinnertime staples. “I’m still the same kind of free speech Democrat that I would’ve been 30 years ago,” he says. “But other Democrats have changed.”

Book publishing is in his blood. His father, Nick Lyons, was an author, college professor and top editor at Crown who later started a publishing house based on his passion for fly-fishing, eventually publishing books far removed from that niche. The elder Mr. Lyons, still writing at 91, says he wanted to bring out only books “that had something to do with things I believed in fully.” But he respects his son’s more ecumenical approach and acknowledges with a laugh that the younger Mr. Lyons was never one to be deterred by fatherly cautions.

Launched in 2006, Skyhorse now publishes some 450 books a year. Recent works defend ivermectin as a Covid treatment, explore the theory that the disease originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and celebrate the joys of Glock firearms. Controversial Skyhorse authors include Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Alan Dershowitz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump attorney Christina Bobb published a book with Skyhorse alleging vote-stealing in the 2020 election.

To its critics, therefore, Skyhorse is a redoubt of the disgraced and the disreputable, in particular those of a conservative bent. But Skyhorse also published former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who used his inside knowledge to tear into the former president in a ferociously critical book that became a bestseller.

Other books that might surprise and please leftists include “Midnight in Samarra: The True Story of WMD, Greed, and High Crimes in Iraq,” “The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela,” “The Hunting Ground: The Inside Story of Sexual Assault on American College Campuses,” “The Antiracist: How to Start the Conversation about Race and Take Action” and “The Little Book of Restorative Justice Program Design.”

Skyhorse authors include left-leaning stalwarts Chris Hedges, Mark Hertsgaard, Robert Scheer and Salon founder David Talbot, with whom Mr. Lyons published a provocative imprint called Hot Books. Titles in that line included “The Case For Impeaching Trump” by Elizabeth Holtzman and “American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes” by Rebecca Gordon.

“Tony Lyons is one of the few gutsy, risk-taking executives left in the publishing industry,” says Mr. Talbot, who is writing another book for Skyhorse, this one on the persistence of the military-industrial complex. “The left was supposed to be about free speech.” But now, as Mr. Lyons says, “the left wants to censor the right on certain things, and the right wants to censor the left on certain things.”

You may disdain any number of his books, but in recent years his willingness to publish what others won’t has made Skyhorse not only a bulwark of dissent across the political spectrum but also a stronghold of literary culture against its self-righteous antagonists. In 2021, Blake Bailey’s huge biography of Philip Roth was hailed as “a narrative masterwork” by Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times. Mr. Bailey’s book was the result of uniquely extensive access to the novelist, who died in 2018, as well as to his papers. But when the biographer was accused of sexual misconduct, including rape, W.W. Norton withdrew the book. It remains in print thanks to Skyhorse.

Mr. Bailey has denied the allegations, and Mr. Lyons considers them irrelevant to the merits of the book. “A publisher’s role is not to determine what happened,” he says. “Even if Blake Bailey had been found guilty of something, that wouldn’t have impacted my decision to publish the best, most comprehensive book on Philip Roth. Nobody else is going to write a book like this. Nobody else could. So this is an important book.”

Similarly in 2020, when Hachette caved in to staff protests and canceled the impending publication of Woody Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” Mr. Lyons snapped it up and printed 75,000 copies. Mr. Allen, accused of sexual abuse by his daughter, has denied the allegations, of which a 1992 police investigation cleared him. The autobiography of an important American film director, writer and comedian has genuine cultural significance, but might not be available if not for Skyhorse.

Writers have always struggled with censorship. Courageous publishers once risked financial loses and even prison  to get James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller into print. In the Soviet Union, citizens faced severe punishment for reading illicit works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel. Today, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, publishers unmolested by official censors cancel books under pressure from young employees and hire “sensitivity readers” to comb manuscripts for anything that might offend. Even older books, such as those by Roald Dahl, are sanitized for new editions.

That’s how Mr. Lyons found himself publishing the novelist Bruce Wagner, called “a visionary posing as a farceur” by Salman Rushdie and someone who “writes like a wizard” by John Updike. Wagner says that when he submitted his novel “The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories” to his former publisher, his editor demanded huge swaths be cut. “There was so much he objected to,” Mr. Wagner says. “One of my characters used [an antigay slur] and that was taboo, in the same realm as when he said that ‘not even a fictional character can call themselves fat.’ In other words, novelistic characters have a ceiling on what they’re able to express.”

Unwilling to comply, Mr. Wagner withdrew the book, releasing it online and telling journalist Sam Wasson that “my entire body of work would be thrown into a furnace if it were to be read and judged by sensitivity readers.” His next book, a provocative work of fictional oral history entitled “Roar: American Master,” was deemed “problematic” by yet another publisher. So his agent, Andrew Wylie, took it to Skyhorse, which published it last year. “Tony Lyons is fearless,” Mr. Wagner says. “He is an absolute champion of artists and their work.”

Mr. Lyons doesn’t use sensitivity readers, and that alone qualifies him as a maverick in today’s environment. But he’s really an old-fashioned civil libertarian wary of power in all its forms. He especially deplores the extent to which social-media platforms, traditional media and government seem to have joined hands to combat “misinformation.” He sees such coercive unity as antithetical to the healthy clash of viewpoints necessary for discovering truth.

“The internet started out as an incredible opportunity for freedom of speech,” he says. “You’d have so many voices and the smartest people, the people with the best arguments, would probably rise to the top. And I believe that that would happen if you would allow freedom of speech. But the idea now is that the government wants to tell people what’s right. And even when they’re terribly wrong, they don’t admit to it.”

He speaks acidly of the death toll from an invasion of Iraq based on false information, of the government’s mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, and of a credulous media and publishing establishment that accepts official pronouncements uncritically. Now he’s about to publish a book called “Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness” by Miriam Grossman, a physician board-certified in child and adolescent psychiatry who is critical of the medical establishment’s “gender affirming” approach to children who are confused about their sexual identity. “I’m very proud of it,” he says, “and it’s going to be very controversial.”

Is there anything Mr. Lyons wouldn’t publish? Two of his books, “The Great Reset” and “The Great Awakening,” are by Alex Jones, who has twice been found liable for defamation for his claims that the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax. “If he was writing a book about the shootings,” Mr. Lyons says, “I would not want to publish that.”

Mr. Akst, a writer in New York’s Hudson Valley, writes the Journal’s weekly news quiz.