Time magazine has an excerpt from Open Letter, the posthumously published manifesto by Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, Stéphane Charbonnier, who was killed in the January attack. In this controversial passage from the book, due out in English next month, Charbonnier lays out his objections to the term Islamophobia, which he claims obscures the underlying problems of racism and discrimination against the poor.
Jane Hu looks around the archive of the great queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (kept in her Manhattan apartment until an institution decides to acquire it), and talks to Sedgwick’s husband, Hal, who maintains it: “I know that there is enormous generative power in her work,” he says, “and I don’t want that ever to be lost.”
As round-up season begins to wind down, there are still a few more revelations to be had: People magazine, for instance, shares with us President Barack Obama’s book of the year—he chose Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies.
Meanwhile, the longlist is out for the next Tournament of Books, to take place in March, and you can apply to be a judge.
BuzzFeed’s ethics guidelines apparently preclude any expressions of political partisanship by its writers and editors, but its chief, Ben Smith, has announced in a memo that they should feel free to attack Donald Trump (and certain parties at Time magazine have evidently felt the same).
Anyone who hasn’t yet read Ariel Levy’s New Yorker piece on Transparent creator Jill Soloway is missing out on both a portrait of the poet Eileen Myles and the most appealing depiction of a TV writers’ room we’ve encountered: “The writers Soloway assembled for ‘Transparent’ . . . are her playmates and her propaganda squad. Only one of them, Bridget Bedard, had experience in television before joining the show, as a writer on ‘Mad Men.’ Soloway culled the rest of her staff from academia, fiction, queer activism, film, and musical theatre.”
