At Vanity Fair, James Wolcott looks at rise of “name-brand journalists” like Arianna Huffington, Malcolm Gladwell, Ezra Klein, and Nate Silver, and wonders if their enterprises are sustainable: “The demands of being a byline superhero can spread a journalist’s time and focus so thin—all those honoraria to collect!—that he or she may start serving up skimpily researched quickies or, worse, sloppy seconds.”
A report on the lack of persons of color in children’s books.
The Quarterly Conversation’s spring issue is dedicated to Lydia Davis, including articles and reviews of the American short short-story writer and translator. Among many excellent articles on Davis is Lynne Tillman’s look at the story “A Mown Lawn”: “The reader is made aware, as the narrative unfolds, that Davis is shaking words loose from their moorings, even exhuming them, to knock the stuffing or deadness out of them. To expose them.”
Wes Anderson talks about the influence of novelist Stefan Zweig’s work on his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
At the Nation, Michelle Goldberg weighs in on Columbia’s firing of Kim Hopper and Carole Vance (author of Pleasure and Danger) because they had not won the university |http://www.thenation.com/article/178821/columbia-university-fired-two-eminent-public-intellectuals-heres-why-it-matters#|enough grant money|. The National Book Critics Circle has posted a video of Friday night’s award ceremony, which saw Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pick up the fiction honor, and Sheri Fink win the non fiction prize (the full list of awards can be found here.) At the Washington Post, critic Ron Charles picks three of his favorite moments from the night.
