Zadie Smith Sparks Controversy Due To New Yorker Essay

After British author Zadie Smith wrote a 3,000-word essay for The New Yorker , the backlash on social media was nearly immediate and thunderous. The essay, equal parts linguistic exercise and philosophy, attempted to argue that a central problem of the campus protests currently engulfing many institutions of higher education across the country boils down to an imprecise employment of language and rhetoric. 



Not long after Smith’s piece was published, on X, formerly known as Twitter, Vulture reposted a 2023 review of Smith’s latest book by Andrea Long Chu , a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. In that piece, Chu traces the writer’s practice of negative capability, or the practice of articulating the virtue of seeing something from both sides. Chu argued in her piece that Smith’s practice of publicly engaging in negative capability throughout her career as a public intellectual tends to land her in hot water, and the response from the wider literary and academic community to her essay titled “Shibboleth” is emblematic of this criticism. 




If you want to know why Zadie Smith is two-siding a genocide after 8 months of indefensible bloodshed, Andrea Long Chu nailed it in How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth: https://t.co/WZN38tMmkA https://t.co/C52rFGrolA pic.twitter.com/zCBQ7QgZ71 — Thamina Eff