paper trail

2019 Guggenheim Fellows announced; Why Sally Rooney is more than a millennial author

Carmen Maria Machado. Photo: Tom Storm

Literary Hub’s Emily Temple writes that it’s time to recognize Sally Rooney as more than just a “millennial writer.” “In the same way that praising novels as ‘timely’ unintentionally undercuts their worth—suggesting that they have an expiration date, that their contents are only important in the moment—defining a writer by her generation, especially a generation so roundly mocked and fretted over, feels like a subtle undermining of her abilities,” she explains.

The 2019 Guggenheim Fellows have been announced. Recipients include Carmen Maria Machado, Catherine Lacey, and Julia Bryan-Wilson.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has won the April Sidney Award for her reporting on “how Fox News became the propaganda arm and the policy shop for the Trump White House.”

Splinter’s Samantha Grasso wonders why NPR’s Morning Edition segment on Stephen Miller didn’t bother to explore the white nationalist roots of Miller’s policies.

At The Atlantic and the New Yorker respectively, Andrew Ferguson and Michael Luo argue the merits of print journalism, which they say allows readers to pay more attention. “How well can news be absorbed by osmosis?” Luo asks. “Studies have found that people bounce between tasks on their computers at stunning rates; a paper published last year found a median switch time of eleven seconds. Introduce mobile devices into the mix, and the switching is even faster. It’s no wonder that news is getting chopped up into smaller bits.” Ferguson agrees. “On my phone or my laptop, I am beckoned incessantly to click on one link or another or still another,” he writes. “Mysterious algorithms known only to the gremlins of Silicon Valley push me toward stories that the gremlins reckon must be of related interest, as though, having read a story about Trea Turner’s broken index finger, I will now be eager for a review of the latest developments in orthopedic surgery.”