paper trail

Bernard-Henri Lévy on books for Trump; A book deal for a banned Twitter user

Bernard-Henri Lévy

The New York Times looks ahead to the most anticipated books of 2017. Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, Joan Didion’s South and West, and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot all make the cut.

Journalist David Fahrenthold reflects on his long investigation of Donald Trump’s charity throughout the presidential campaign. After his work failed to dissuade voters from electing Trump, a German reporter asked if he felt his work mattered. Fahrenthold writes that it did matter, but the length of the campaign made it hard for his articles to have an impact. “In an election as long and wild as this, a lot of other stories and other people mattered, too. I did my job. The voters did theirs. Now my job goes on,” Fahrenthold writes. “I’ll seek to cover Trump the president with the same vigor as I scrutinized Trump the candidate.”

Philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy recommends that president-elect Donald Trump read E. E. Cummings’s Complete Poems, “if only for the line that became famous after Woody Allen put it in the mouth of one of the characters in ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’: ‘nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’”

Now that Twitter is hiring editors for their live video product Periscope, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz writes that the company “seems to be embracing” the idea that it is a media company. “Whether Twitter says it or not,” Kantrowitz writes, “it’s clear the company wants to be more than simply a dumb pipe for programming created by others.”

Breitbart editor and banned Twitter user Milo Yiannopoulos has signed a $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions. Dangerous will be available next March. BuzzFeed points out that this won’t be Yiannopoulos’s first book: In 2007, he self-published Eskimo Papoose, a book of poetry “full of plagiarized lines.” Quartz takes a look at the other books published by Threshold Editions, an imprint that was founded “to provide a forum for the creative people, bedrock principles, and innovative ideas of contemporary conservatism.” Authors include Donald Trump, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard writes that the many calls for a boycott of Simon & Schuster suggest that publishing the book could be damaging to its reputation among more liberal readers. “Something more organized than people tweeting the word ‘boycott’ again and again—perhaps akin to the #StopBeck drive that eventually got him booted from the airwaves—could be incredibly costly,” Shephard writes.