Andrew Sullivan is resigning from New York magazine. Bari Weiss has resigned from the New York Times. Weiss’s letter calling it quits, in which she cites bullying at the paper and an “illiberal environment,” was approvingly shared by Donald Trump Jr., Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Ted Cruz, among others.
The backlash to Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller White Fragility continues, with new ciritques by Daniel Bergner and John McWhorter.
The head of the National Book Foundation, Lisa Lucas, is joining Penguin Random House as senior vice president and publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books. At the Times, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris looks at Lucas’s hiring as the latest sign that “In Publishing, Everything is Up for Change.” Noting that in the past year much of publishing’s old guard has died, retired, or moved on to other ventures, the article profiles a new generation of book executives. Dana Canedy, who recently became the first Black person to lead a major publisher when she was hired at Simon & Schuster, said: “The most obvious element of diversity I bring is being a Black woman, but I also grew up in a small town in Kentucky. I’m also of a military family. I’m also a single mother. . . I think I will be more open, perhaps, than some to taking a chance on unknown authors.”
At Nieman Lab, Deborah Douglas talks to Tiffany Walden, the editor-in-chief of The TRiiBE, about how the Chicago outlet responded to TMZ’s “punitive coverage” of a large house party attended by young Black people in the city’s West Side. The TRiiBE in one of many news sources constituting the new Black press and “changing the lenses of victimization and dysfunction into lenses of empowerment and agency.” Neiman Lab highlights TheGrio, ZORA, The Undefeated, The Root, Outlier Media, The Plug, Blavity, and more.
Tonight at 7:30pm EST, the Center for Fiction hosts Stephen Graham Jones for an online discussion of his new horror novel, The Only Good Indians, with Victor LaValle.
