David Marcus, formerly the co-editor of Dissent magazine and also the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of writings by Marshall Berman, has been hired to be the new Literary Editor of The Nation.
Poynter reports that the Dallas Morning News’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton may have cost the paper subscribers. “We write our editorials based on principle, and sometimes principle comes at a cost,” news editor Mike Wilson said. Last week, Donald Trump supporters demonstrated in front of the newspaper’s office to protest the endorsement.
Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature has won the Royal Society Insight Investment science book prize. The book details the life of Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth-century naturalist and explorer who “has more things named after him than anyone who has ever lived, including an ocean current, a six-foot squid and a breed of penguin.”
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Daniel Golden will be joining ProPublica as a senior editor next month. Meanwhile, the news site’s Electionland project, which began by partnering with one-hundred local news outlets to monitor obstacles to voting on election day nationwide, now has 250 participating news organizations.
Betting is now open for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which will be announced on October 7th. According to the betting site Ladbrokes, Haruki Murakami (odds: 5/1), Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (7/1), and Philip Roth (8/1) are among the authors favored to win, while Bob Dylan (50/1), Joan Didion (66/1), and Don DeLillo (66/1) are considered longshots.
The Guardian has a roundup of some of the panels at Sunday’s Brooklyn Book Festival, noting that the speakers often talked of “an America that is riddled with anxieties” in the face of the upcoming election. A Necessary Trouble author Sarah Jaffe worried about the stories going unreported “because we’re busy hanging on every word Trump says,” while The Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith said that for Trump’s backers “democracy is in full force.” The previous evening’s IED explosion in Manhattan was mentioned only briefly at the “Terror, Threats and Fear” panel featuring Masha Gessen, Amitava Kumar, and Moustafa Bayoumi. Gessen, the author of a book about the Tsarnaev brothers, noted that while it’s impossible to find a root cause for a terrorist act, “nobody is going to blow people up if they’ve had a great life.” Of the frightening possibility of a Trump presidency, the Ottawa-born Margaret Atwood seemed to read many of the attendees’ minds, joking that “Canada is not big enough to come to the rescue. . . . But you’re all welcome. We’ll set up cots.”