Linda Amster, a research supervisor at the New York Times, put in long hours on the Pentagon Papers story, but did not receive credit. Now, in a new oral history and audio interview, she’s getting recognition—sort of. Though she’s been allowed to narrate her role, the paper will not amend the original piece, as Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha explains: “We’re setting the record straight with readers with the new reporting and podcast. It’s more effective than appending an update or correction on a decades old story.” Remembering the original snub, Amster tells an interviewer: “It was so hurtful to me. And even to this day, you know, I laugh about it, because what else can I do?”
Lucie Elven writes about Los Angeles essayist Eve Babitz (“even her cat Rosie had connections”) for the London Review of Books. “Babitz’s medium is the energy that comes from enthusiastically recommending, judging, doing something verboten,” Elven writes. Babitz would prescribe a tuna melt from her favorite deli for midlife crisis, taquitos for overdoses, and garish notepaper to cure a nervous breakdown.
The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Fellowship application is open now. Fifteen fellowships will be awarded to visual artists, academics, creative writers, and independent scholars whose work “will benefit directly from access to the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.”
An ABC 20/20 segment with James Baldwin, recorded in 1979 but never aired, is now available to watch on Vimeo from documentarian Joseph Lovett’s A Closer Look, Inc.
In “You Can’t Escape the Attention Economy,” Kaitlyn Tiffany writes about how ideas—via tweets, memes, and NFTs— are monetized online: “At this point, when most of our interactions happen in this handful of highly commodified spaces, who could be blamed for feeling like everything they do is—or at least feels like—commerce?”
Former executives from conservative imprints at Hachette and Simon & Schuster are starting a new publishing company, All Seasons Press. The New York Times reports that the company is “courting former Trump officials who staunchly supported the president through the bitter end of his administration, including those who echoed the president’s false claims that the election was rigged.”
On Saturday, Dr. Peniel Joseph, Annette Gordon-Reed, Keffrelyn Brown, and other scholars and community leaders will participate in the Juneteenth Freedom Summit, hosted by The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. Gordon-Reed will give a keynote lecture “on the meaning of Juneteenth.”
