On Friday, Bret Stephens’s debut op-ed in the New York Times, a column in which he defended some climate-change skeptics, infuriated environmentalists and “didn’t sit well with many of his colleagues in the newsroom.” Many Times readers have threatened to cancel their subscriptions. The Times has now released a statement from op-ed editor James Bennet, who states, “If all of our columnists and all of our contributors and all of our editorials agreed all of the time, we wouldn’t be promoting the free exchange of ideas, and we wouldn’t be serving our readers very well.” At the Washington Post, Erik Wemple calls the statement the “Editorial Page Editor’s Boilerplate Kumbaya Response to Public Outrage.”
Emma Straub, author of the bestselling novel Modern Lovers, has opened a new bookstore in Brooklyn called Books are Magic.
George Saunders talks about moving from the short story to writing his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo: “I thought, if I don’t try this thing now . . . I’m not getting any younger, so maybe it would be a good time to take a real artistic risk, to genuinely risk failure.”
At The¨NBSP;Guardian, Chris Kraus talks about the new TV adaptation (by Jill Soloway) of her book I Love Dick. “Of course, they’ve changed it,” she says. “But one brilliant thing they’ve done is to tap into the phenomenon of the book, the way it now has a life of its own.” Reflecting on whether the book is a personal one, Kraus notes, “It’s a universal comedy. Who hasn’t had an affair? Who hasn’t had an infatuation? Even so, the serious question that goes unanswered in I Love Dick is: what could bring a married couple to collaborate on love letters to a third person?”
Today is the deadline to apply for the Yi Dae Up Fellowship. Funded by the novelist Alexander Chee, the fellowship provides funds (and a $500 travel stipend) to an Asian or Asian American woman to attend the Jack Jones writing retreat for women of color in Taos, New Mexico. The retreat will take place October 12 through 26.