On Monday, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love, initiated a dramatic, public self-cancellation, and removed her latest “offending” work from publication. The crime? Her unreleased novel, which followed a family’s struggle against Soviet communism in the 1930s, was set in Russia, which a small group of actual crazy people on the internet apparently believe forbidden. Gilbert’s was a wild act of self-censorship, which set a dangerous precedent. But mostly. . . nobody cared, and it was all kind of just embarrassing. …

Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-cancellation video is, among other things, an ambitious exercise in genre-mixing: the whispering, intimate tone of a TikTok confessional, the stark lighting of a hostage video, and the camera angle of your Boomer parents FaceTiming from an iPad that’s perched on the coffee table.

[As FP editor Peter Savodnik says in a foreword to Rosenfeld’s essay, “If only Gilbert … had managed to summon her inner Solzhenitsyn.” Caving to the Cutural Revolution at hand currently isn’t all that much removed from caving to the Soviet censors, except in the amount of cowardice involved. Cringe, indeed. — Ed]