The Washington Post‘s Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian, who’s been in prison in Iran since July, is now facing formal charges, including espionage.
Pulitzers were just announced—winners include Elizabeth Kolbert for The Sixth Extinction and Anthony Doerr for All the Light We Cannot See.
Michael Eric Dyson has attempted a demolition job on Cornel West in the New Republic, presenting West’s criticisms of the Obama presidency as the whining of a “spurned” and “embittered” political lover who “should have understood that Obama had had similar trysts with many others.” West’s intellectual trajectory, Dyson writes, has been in steep decline for years: Where once he “rode the beast of philosophy with linguistic panache as he snagged deep concepts and big thinkers in his theoretical lasso,” he now resembles a washed-up Mike Tyson, “given to biting our ears with personal attacks rather than bending our minds with fresh and powerful scholarship.” Not Tyson but Ali, Dave Zirin rejoins in the Nation, further noting that Dyson’s feelings toward West seem uncannily like those he attributes to West in relation to Obama, and that “Dyson never forgoes taking a roundhouse punch, even when just a jab will do.”