At New York, Christian Lorentzen has an essay on Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, in which he joins Elaine Blair in bringing “some skepticism to the dizzy proceedings,” and also considers the Franzen phenomenon more generally: “Do you love Jonathan Franzen? Does America? Does the world? These questions sound ridiculous, but they’re the ones Franzen has been posing over the past two decades, as he has, against long odds, made himself the kind of public figure about whom they aren’t entirely ridiculous or even unusual.”
After two journalists were killed while on a routine assignment in Virginia, Poynter has some suggested guidelines for what should and shouldn’t be shown in coverage of such events.
The Awl predicts “a bloodbath” at Condé Nast, where employees are being asked to account for their activities task by task, hour by hour.
Disappointingly, it seems as if Cormac McCarthy does not tweet.
September 10th has been named George Scialabba Day by Cambridge City Council, and the Baffler is organizing a party that night at the Brattle Theatre (Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and others will be there) to celebrate Scialabba’s “retirement” from his work at Harvard and “entry into the uncertain world of writing for his supper.” That sounds like good news for editors—and for anyone in Cambridge on the 10th, too.
