At the New York Times, Jennifer Miller wonders if we’ve “hit peak podcast.” Currently, there are more than 700,000 podcasts available for listening, and up to 3,000 new ones started each month. “We’re not necessarily sick of listening to interesting programs” she writes, “but we’re definitely tired of hearing from every friend, relative and co-worker who thinks they’re just an iPhone recording away from creating the next ‘Serial.’”

Paul Holdengraber talks to John Waters about summer reading, working at Mary Oliver’s bookstore, and his new memoir, Mr. Know-It-All.

The 2019 Whiting Literary

The line-up for the 92nd Street Y’s 2019-20 season has been announced. The schedule includes readings from André Aciman, Jeanette Winterson, Ann Patchett, and more.

Literary Hub offers a literary Emmys guide.

New York magazine’s Sarah Jones reports on the tensions at First Look Media. In response to recent layoffs and the shuttering of both Topic magazine and The Nib, as well as rumors that “the company had acquired, or planned to acquire, a smutty Netflix clone” owned by Elon Musk’s sister, employees have written a letter to management expressing “deep concern” that the company “might branch

The photo archive of Ebony and Jet are being auctioned by the magazines’ former publishing company, USA Today reports. “It’s something worth saving,” said University of Mississippi journalism professor Samir Husni, who hopes the buyer will donate the collection to a museum or other institution. “This is not something that one individual ought to have or keep for themselves. . . . This is a history that should be open for everybody.”

Variety reports that Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes From a Young Black Chef is being adapted into a film. Sorry to Bother You’s Lakeith Stanfield has signed on to star.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop wonders why many mainstream media outlets won’t call Trump’s racist remarks about a group of women senators exactly what they are. “Calling a president’s words ‘racist’ or ‘a lie’ can legitimately be thorny. Should we throw the words around? Probably not. But we should use them when they accurately reflect the truth,” he writes. “When we contort ourselves to dance around that fact, the truth is injured.” Despite recently creating a policy about “controversial content” tweeted by public figures, Twitter has decided that Trump’s recent tweets do not merit

Self-styled “hatchet man” Dale Peck wrote a scathing and personal takedown of Pete Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy at the New Republic on Friday. After an outcry from readers, the story was retracted by TNR’s editors, who also apologized. Mayor Pete, for his part, seemed unfazed: “I appreciated that [the] article was taken down. I don't think it really reflects the New Republic that I know. . . . The most disturbing news story I saw yesterday was the Vice President's visit to those border facilities."

Publishers Weekly has posted a list of this fall season’s most anticipated books by debut

Yahoo News reports from the president’s social media summit at the White House yesterday. The gathering of right-wing media pundits and conservative activists was treated to a nearly hour-long speech during which the commander-in-chief railed against the mainstream media and large social-media companies and complained that he should have more followers on Twitter.

Entertainment Weekly lists the best recent food books, including Ruth Reichl’s Save Me the Plums, Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes From a Young Black Chef, and Anthony Bourdain Remembered.

At Literary Hub, Marcy Dermansky explains how the

Michael Eric Dyson is working on a new book about Jay-Z that “wrestles with the biggest theme of his career, hustling, and what it looks like when it shows up illegally in the underground and how it looks when it’s part of legitimate society.” Jay-Z: Made in America will be published by St. Martin’s Press next November.

Director Brian De Palma is writing his first novel. Are Snakes Necessary? is “‘a blistering political satire’ that doubles as a female revenge thriller,” according to Entertainment Weekly. The book is being cowritten by Susan Lehman and will be published next year by Hard Case

After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the alleged sex trafficking of minors on Saturday, journalist Vicky Ward claimed that her 2003 profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair had been edited to remove credible allegations of sexual misconduct. Ward says that then-editor Graydon Carter cut the testimony of two women and a corroborating witness. Ward tweeted on Monday, “I have thought often about the fact that if my piece had been published in full—with the names and stories of these women—the FBI may have come after Epstein sooner and perhaps some of his victims would have been saved.” Carter emailed

The Chicago Defender, the legendary African American newspaper, will cease its print publication after tomorrow’s edition. The paper will become online only, a move that Hiram E. Jackson, the CEO of the Defender’s parent company, said will “make us more nimble.” Ethan Michaeli, the author of The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (2016), gave a sense of the paper’s monumental importance, telling the Chicago Sun Times, “It was an essential force in American history for the whole of the 20th century.”

At Vulture, Hillary Kelly profiles Helen Phillips, author of The Need

In a rumored six-figure deal, Scribner has bought two books by deputy op-ed editor Clay Risen: Red Scare, an analysis of hysteria over Communism in the US, and The Whiskey Barons, which is, according to the publisher, about “the epic clash of personalities in the Gilded Age between two business titans who battled for control of the whiskey industry.”

Dani Shapiro’s memoir Inheritance—about the crisis the author experienced after her assumptions about her family were destroyed by a DNA test—is being turned into a movie by Killer Films studio.

Art historian, critic, editor, and curator Douglas

Robert Wideman, the subject of John Edgar Wideman’s 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, has been serving a sentence of life without parole, but now that Governor Tom Wolf has commuted his sentence, he will soon be free. Robert was convicted of second-degree murder for being an accomplice in a 1975 robbery that resulted in the shooting and death of a car salesman named Nichola Morena. Brothers and Keepers explored the different paths that the author and his sibling had taken: “However numerous and comforting the similarities, we were different," the author wrote. "The world had seized on the

The Columbia Journalism Review reports on the dismal prospects for people working in media. Between January and May of this year, roughly 3,000 journalists were laid off or offered a buyout. According to Gerry Smith, writing in Bloomberg, 2019 is on track to be the worst year for the industry since 2009. Andrew Challenger, part of the firm that compiled the data, told Smith: “In most industries, employers can’t find enough people to fill the jobs they have open. . . . In news, it has been the opposite story. And it seems to have been accelerating.”

Poynter has started a new series, “How We