Longreads has an interview with former New York Times staff critic Nate Chinen, who “might have been the last full-time jazz reviewer at any American newspaper.” In his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, Chinen looks at the twenty years he spent writing about live music, and argues that jazz has recently entered a rich, productive, and expensive phase. “The culture of jazz has shifted perceptibly during my time covering it. It’s much more permeable and permissive and dynamic and fluid. I think that’s a really exciting development,” Chinen notes. “I’m a big proponent of that, and to me the conversation around jazz is more useful now than it was when I was first starting out.”
Charles Harder, a litigation counsel for the Trump campaign, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Simon & Schuster, warning the publisher that if it released Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Look at the Trump White House, a lawsuit would be filed. The Trump campaign has also filed a suit against Manigault Newman, who once worked on The Apprentice, alleging that she has breached a confidentiality agreement she signed in 2016, when she became one of Trump’s political aides. Simon & Schuster has said that it “will not be intimidated.” In response to Harder’s letter, Simon & Schuster’s counsel Elizabeth McNamara has written: “While your letter generally claims that excerpts from the book contain ‘disparaging statements,’ it is quite telling that at no point do you claim that any specific statement in the book is false. Your client does not have a viable legal claim merely because unspecified truthful statements in the Book may embarrass the president or his associates. At base, your letter is nothing more than an obvious attempt to silence legitimate criticism of the president.”
Rebecca Mead, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of My Life in Middlemarch, writes about her decision to return, after decades, to England.
George Pelecanos—a crime writer who is also known for his work on the HBO series The Wire—talks about his new book, The Man Who Came Uptown, and why it is important for people in the criminal-justice system to have access to books.
Norton’s Jill Bialosky has purchased Sahar Mustafah’s debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, about a young Palestinian-American woman whose sister goes missing. Mustafah’s first book, the short story collection Code of the West, was published last year.