paper trail

Ada Limón is named US poet laureate; Jeffrey Goldberg revisits murder case author Delia Owens is wanted for questioning in

Ada Limón. Photo: Lucas Marquardt

Ada Limón, the author most recently of the collection The Hurting Kind, has been named the twenty-fourth US poet laureate. “Poetry is a way back in, to recognizing that we are feeling human beings,” Limón told the New York Times. “And feeling grief and feeling trauma can actually allow us to feel joy again.”

At The Nation, Kevin Lozano writes about the decline of American glossy magazines in a review of former Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown’s memoir Dilettante: “While Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, and the like still carry some cachet, they are no longer ubiquitous. Instead, they are relics of a vanished era of prosperity when their pages were bloated with ads and their editors in chief served as the feudal lords of competing fiefs. Today, when someone narrates the story of this heyday, it is hard not to feel like you’re reading an obituary.”

The Atlantic has released its newly digitized archive, which includes every story the magazine has published since 1857. 

Delia Owens, author of the best-selling novel turned movie Where the Crawdads Sing, is wanted for questioning in the case of the televised 1995 murder of an alleged poacher in Zambia. Owens is not a suspect. Laura Miller wrote about the similarities between the novel and aspects of the case in a 2019 piece for Slate, and Jeffrey Goldberg reported on the incident in a 2010 New Yorker story. For The Atlantic, Goldberg revisits the case. “I can’t even go into the U.S. embassy with a camera,” Zambia’s chief prosecutor Lillian Shawa-Siyuni told Goldberg. “I want to know how Mark and Delia brought guns into Zambia and turned themselves into law-enforcement agents.” 

A new digital-only issue of the New Yorker is online now, with stories on family by Susan Orlean, Emily Witt, Jessica Winter, Hua Hsu, and more. New pieces by Eliza Griswold, Liana Finck, and Rachel Syme will be released throughout the week.