In the Culture issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Nancy Coleman, Kate Guadagnino, Thessaly La Force, M. H. Miller, Mallika Rao, and others interview artists and writers about their process. Among the many interviewees are Don Mee Choi, Brontez Purnell, Kevin Young, Eileen Myles, and Ayana Mathis.
For The Nation, Kyle Paoletta looks at the past and future of the New York Times Book Review, as it looks for a new editor following the departure of Pamela Paul, who has become an opinion columnist. Paoletta writes, “With no successor yet announced, the question of which path the Book Review will take becomes more pronounced. Continuing to chase an audience whose attention might be elsewhere with hat tricks, celebrity contributors, and recommendation lists may be tempting to the new editor, even if recent history has provided little indication that doing so strengthens the Review’s influence or authority.”
In “They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!,” Alex Pareene writes about the reaction to Taylor Lorenz’s Washington Post story about the right-wing social-media account Libs of TikTok. After Lorenz revealed the identity of the person behind the accounts, Twitter was ablaze with takes and counter-takes about media ethics. To Pareene, though, such debates miss the point: “This new right fundamentally doesn’t want ‘newsgathering’ to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda.”
In response to an article published yesterday at Current Affairs, Lincoln Michel corrects misconceptions about the writing convention “show don’t tell” in his latest Counter Craft post. The idea (which Michel notes is far from a hard rule) “is not about writing memories over philosophies or having characters have only sensations and not beliefs. It’s certainly not about avoiding a ‘writer’s passions’!”
Jess Swoboda talks with Nan Z. Da for the eighth installment of The Point’s “Criticism in Public” interview series. Da is the editor of the University of Chicago Press’s book series “Thinking Literature,” and the author of Intransitive Encounter, which investigates the literary meetings between China and the US during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Jewish Currents is accepting applications for its one-year paid journalism fellowship.
