Tonight at 6 p.m. Bookforum hosts its annual Valentine’s Day reading at the New Museum. Clancy Martin, Laura Kipnis, Lynne Tillman, Paul Beatty, and Joseph O’Neill will read selections on the theme of “Foreign Affairs.” Should be sexy! The event is free, but please RSVP to [email protected] to get on the list.
Lester Holt has temporarily replaced Brian Williams, as NBC discusses whether to allow Williams to return; Holt may continue on in Williams’s place.
In the New York Review of Books, Francine Prose suggests that the controversy surrounding the historical inaccuracy of films such as Selma or The Imitation Game stems from their subject matter: “It’s so much easier and less threatening to talk about whether (or how much) a film is ‘true’ than to confront the unpleasant-and indisputable-truth: that racial and sexual prejudice have persisted so long past the historical eras in which these films are set.”
Ellis Jones has been named Vice’s new editor in chief. She will be the first female EIC in the magazine’s twenty-year history.
The Awl responds to the truism that anybody who doesn’t “need” to be writer shouldn’t bother. But nobody needs it: “If you have somehow managed to pull off being a writer I congratulate you on a successful scam, but you more than anyone should know how little need comes into play.” Also, in an advice column, Choire Sicha considers the pros and cons of settling for a well-paid job in publicity over being a badly paid writer: “What are you gonna do, spurn opportunities that make you happy because capital is so shitty? Well, capitalism isn’t getting less shitty while you’re alive.”
An Egyptian court has granted bail to two Al Jazeera journalists, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy.
At the New York Times, Jon Ronson describes the aftermath of a single tweet: a (racist) joke Justine Sacco made in late 2013 as she left for a trip to South Africa. When Sacco tweeted the joke, she had 170 followers. Her flight was eleven hours long. When she arrived in Cape Town, she was trending in the number-one spot on Twitter, and a hashtag had emerged: #HasJustineLandedYet. Ronson investigates what happened to Sacco over the course of the following year.