I have been reading Joseph Epstein's essays (collected in many books) for over thirty years--not always with agreement, but always with interest and illumination. His new essay "There Are Too Many Overweight Biographies", in the September 2020 issue of Commentary, is a good example. Read it here. One small observation:
[There is] a new trend in publishing: accounts of the writing and publication of other books.
Strangely, I find myself currently engaged in just this sort of thing, in preparing my talk for Oxonmoot on "Humphrey Carpenter on Tolkien: Then and Now (Fifty Years Later)"