The Aspen Words Literary Prize longlist was released yesterday. Nominees include Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, and Bryan Washington’s Lot. The shortlist will be announced in February.
Turkish journalist Ahmet Altan, who was released from prison last week after being imprisoned since 2016, has been rearrested “after the chief public prosecutor appealed against the decision to release” him, The Guardian reports.
Columbia Journalism Review’s CNN public editor Emily Tamkin reflects on the network’s use of clever chyrons that have been praised for effectively calling out Trump’s lies. “These particular chyrons . . . tell us that CNN knows that, once again, it is covering something Trump said that is not true. But a complement is not a substitute,” she writes. “We are now almost three years into the Trump administration. It’s been almost four and a half years since Trump announced he was running for president. It has ceased to be charming to throw up a gotcha chyron while continuing to let Trump’s egregious claims dictate news coverage.”
“The most important piece of technology on my desk is my landline telephone,” New York Times economics reporter Ben Casselman tells the paper about the technology he relies on in his work. “I think some people have the idea that ‘data journalism’ means staring at spreadsheets until a story magically appears, but in the real world that almost never happens.”
The Bread Loaf writers conference is ending its “wait scholars” program, which allowed writers to attend for free while waiting tables at the conference’s dining hall. Director Jennifer Grotz chose to end the program over “concerns raised by waiters in 2016 ranging from sexual harassment to racism to the work cutting into the seminars they came for in the first place,” the New York Times reports. Grotz “also noticed that waiters were often young writers of color, serving fellow writers who were mostly older and white.” “The optics in the dining hall were troubling,” she told the Times, “and very different from what the conference goals were.”
