Editor's Introduction

Why do we publish "reviews" of books and films, especially when reviews litter the Web? Perhaps the question contains its own answer. Scholarly reviews are actually in short supply. The public imagination consumes piles of opinions, but what is an "informed" opinion, and why does it matter? Students write papers that make claim after claim, but those claims often go untested by credible evidence. Even prospective contributors to prestigious journals submit articles for publication but fail to practice the very lessons of evidence that, presumably, those authors might be asked to teach their students. Evidence matters as long as democracy matters—as long as convincing others is more valuable than is coercing them.

The world has always been short on durable and significant claims and on the careful reasoning and apt examples that would make them so. The "essay" was invented as a kind of word laboratory to escape the illusions that spring from prejudice and caprice. Plato flirted with the approach in dialogical form, working through a problem as if anatomizing a body, and then Montaigne and Bacon gave the form its modern expression, looking to "test" a claim in a series of self-contained experiments we call "paragraphs": miniature arguments threaded to form a larger argument. The scientific revolution was underway, and (in this potted history of mine) the rhetoric of argument needed a methodological update.

I invite our readers to consider, then, the peril of failing to distinguish between writers who make their case and those who don't. We publish reviews because they present one of the most efficient pathways into the practice of "informed" thinking. Some writers fail; others succeed. Readers must recognize the difference. "Reviews" begin a conversation with works that many readers would not encounter otherwise. And a good review works hard to make that incipient conversation part of a larger one, connected to people who know more about the topic than does the average Web user. Reviews ask us to take a look, because their authors already have, and they want us to think for just a couple clicks longer—and better.