From the New York Times Magazine, a devastating essay by Claudia Rankine: “The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us.”
So far the doxxing of Saudi Arabia doesn’t seem to have produced any major surprises, but at the Washington Post, Marc Lynch suggests that the materials published by Wikileaks and the Beirut paper al-Akhbar on Friday (the first batch, with many more to come) will matter more than you might think—as with the earlier leak of US diplomatic cables, even when it’s something everyone knows about, there’s a lot to be said for documented proof.
Peter Wayner reminisces in the Atlantic about the editor who “looked at my one of my book proposals and said something along the lines of, ‘It feels like you’ve only got 20,000 words of material. You need at least 80,000 words for a book. Can you pad it?’” No such leniency from Amazon, who as of July plan to start paying royalties based on how many pages are actually read—authors who publish directly on Kindle may soon long to return to being judged by their covers.
And poor beleaguered authors have to compete with the amateurs too: By the time E.L. James came out with the Fifty Shades of Grey sequel her fans had been clamoring for, one Gillian Griffin of Surrey had already posted her own rewrite of the first three novels from Christian Grey’s viewpoint, and got 8.8 million hits. (But lest your heart bleed for James, herself a fanfic graduate, her own version, Grey, has sold a million copies in its first week.)
Amy Chozick told Cosmopolitan the oddly compelling tale of her life in journalism so far, from fetching prosciutto and melon at Condé Nast (“I’m from Texas, we call that ‘ham’”) to the Wall Street Journal’s frumpy, sweaty newsroom, all the way to the Clinton beat.