In his Galaxy Brain newsletter, tech reporter Charlie Warzel wonders what happens now that the Facebook Papers—a vast trove of documents released by an internal source—have been made public. Warzel writes that the leak proves many of the damning things reporters have been saying about Facebook for years, and yet the next steps are still uncertain: “I don’t know what comes next but I’m concerned. I’m concerned that Facebook is too big. I’m concerned that people might tuning out due to over-saturation. I’m concerned that the ‘fixes’ that could come from this momentum are going to be extremely treacherous, too.”
Dylan Byron interviews Fleur Jaeggy, the Swiss author who writes in Italian, for the New Yorker. They discuss Jaeggy’s latest work to be translated into English, how she doesn’t think to distinguish between masculine and feminine, and the soul of her fifty-plus-year-old swamp-green typewriter, Hermes (“Oh, she’s going to be very happy we’re talking about her! She has her vanity.”)
The six Booker Prize shortlisted authors—Patricia Lockwood, Anuk Arudpragasam, Maggie Shipstead, Richard Powers, Nadifa Mohamed, and Damon Galgut—write about the inspiration for their books in The Guardian. Arudpragasam says of his book, A Passage North, “I decided I would write not about the violence, exactly, but about what it means to witness such violence from afar, to be unable to act or intervene, and then unable to forget.” The author also recently talked about the book with Megha Majumdar for Bookforum’s video series No Wrong Answers.
Tonight at 8pm Eastern, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson will discuss her new book My Monticello with Carolyn Ferrell. The online event is paid by donation, with proceeds going to Black Lives Matter DC.
On November 10, the Paris Review and Pioneer Works are hosting a cold read of Gary Indiana’s 2003 roman à clef Do Everything in the Dark. The author will be joined by friends and guest readers who will be announced closer to the event.