At the New Republic, Jamil Smith discusses the New York Times’s coverage of race, specifically its reassignment of Tanzina Vega from the race beat, which she had suggested herself, to the metropolitan section, and the more general tendency of papers across the country to shutter their race beats. Smith quotes Cord Jefferson, who wrote a piece for Matter last summer in which he described his exhaustion writing stories exclusively to do with race. Don’t “assign
The performance artist Marina Abramovic will publish a memoir next year, to coincide with her seventieth birthday.
At the Columbia Journalism Review, a piece on plagiarism: “Journalists are so fragile right now, so damaged by years of newsroom cuts and diminishing impact, that we’re more intent than ever on proving our purity, to ourselves and to our readers. We will therefore land ferociously on any miscreant who borrows even four or five words from another source. We will turn ourselves into the plagiarism police, vainly straining to show that our work is original, when, in fact, nearly all journalism is second-order—that is, we discover, report, and interpret the ideas and actions of others.”
Graywolf has bought Fiona Maazel’s third novel, What Kind of Man.
The New York Times has terminated the Home section of the paper, saying that its content “would fit best in other parts of the Times, including Food and Real Estate.”
Wired has redesigned its website for the first time since 2007.