Editorial staff of the New Yorker have unionized with NewsGuild of New York. New York magazine’s Noreen Malone reports that the group includes copy editors, fact checkers, assistant editors, design staff, and web producers. Malone notes that staff writers are excluded, as they are hired as independent contractors and not staff, an ironic twist that “would not escape the red pen of the magazine’s fact department.” Assistant editor McKenna Stayner said that magazine can not only afford to recognize the union, but that it would be against their professed values not to. “We run labor pieces, and for many of our writers, their system of beliefs is for workers’ rights,” she said. “With the certain kind of tone of moral authority we have taken on, it would be confusing for both readers and employees for there to be a lot of aggressive pressure against unionizing from New Yorker management.”
Fast Company staff are unionizing with Writers Guild of America East.
In a letter on their website, Boston Review editors Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen explain why they have decided to keep Junot Díaz on as the magazine’s fiction editor after numerous women came forward with stories of misconduct. The editors write that during Díaz’s fifteen years on staff, there have been no complaints about his conduct in the workplace, and that they don’t believe the reported incidents “have the kind of severity that animated the #MeToo movement.” In response, Review poetry editors Timothy Donnelly, BK Fischer, and Stefania Heim have decided to resign.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Kamila Shamsie for her novel, Home Fire.
Playwright and performance artist Lars Jan is adapting Joan Didion’s “The White Album” for the stage. The essay will be read by Mia Barron while performers “stage a house party mirroring the social turmoil of the period.” The work will debut at BAM later this fall.
Daniel Radcliffe will co-star in the Broadway adaptation of John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact. Radcliff will play the role of Fingal, the fact checker who worked with D’Agata on an essay for The Believer.
Tonight at Murmrr in Brooklyn, Tao Lin talks with Hamilton Morris about his new book, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation and Change.