paper trail

A new Joy Williams novel is coming this fall; David Brooks’s financial ties to Facebook

Joy Williams. Photo: Penguin Random House

David Brooks is leading an Aspen Institute project called Weave, a movement dedicated to “repairing our country’s social fabric, which is badly frayed by distrust, division and exclusion.” Weave is funded by Facebook and other large donors, but while Brooks has promoted the project in his columns for the New York Times and written about the social media giant, he has not disclosed his financial ties to them. When BuzzFeed News asked a Times spokesperson if they were aware of Brooks’s second salary, they declined to comment.

Joy Williams is publishing her first novel in twenty years this fall. Harrow will be released on September 14. In the meantime, check out Williams’s work for Bookforum, including reviews of Robert Stone, Tatyana Tolstaya, Ernest Hemingway, and Sue Klebold.

HuffPost editor and “senior extremism reporter” Andy Cambell is writing a book on the Proud Boys movement.

On the latest episode of The Experiment podcast, Tracie Hunte talks with Ty Seidule about his new book, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause.

At The Guardian, a write-up of the HBO documentary Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests, which was informed by Merve Emre’s 2018 book The Personality Brokers. Writing about the Myers-Briggs tests in a Bookforum review of Emre’s volume, Molly Fischer noted, “A lack of scientific rigor is easier to overlook when there’s luminous transcendence on offer. With Myers-Briggs, prosaic human behaviors—being on time, having a messy desk, chatting up strangers at a party—extrapolate into destiny.”

Tomorrow afternoon (March 5), Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh will discuss photography and their collaboration on the book Human Archipelago, as part of the National Gallery of Art’s Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography.