David Remnick will no longer be interviewing Steve Bannon as part of the New Yorker Festival next month after the invitation drew intense pushback, including the loss of several participants. “There is a better way to do this,” Remnick said in a statement. “If the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.”
“When you don't have equal rights, it gives you a different perspective,” says What Is Democracy? director Astra Taylor on how growing up as a permanent resident in the US has informed her work. “Of course, this is speaking as a Canadian who's about as privileged a permanent resident as you can be, but I still couldn't vote in elections. I can pay taxes but not vote. This informed my perspective; we can't limit democracy to a citizen.”
Watch the first trailer for HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend at Vulture.
Former NPR executive editor Madhulika Sikka is joining the Washington Post to work on the paper’s daily podcast.
Former Village Voice writers reflect on the paper’s closing. Susan Brownmiller says the Voice taught her how to write. At the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl remembers his years there as “the most fun I’ve ever had as a critic.” “I could consult with a canny photographer . . . to double the thrust, or the irony, of each column. I could take for granted a hip audience that required a minimum of exposition, and was game for jumping into the deep end of the subject at hand,” he writes. “I never worked at the office, but I recall a thrill nearly every time I entered it.”
