Google has released a “Protect Your Election” toolkit ahead of the upcoming elections in France. The kit offers help with password protection, phishing warnings, and defense against denial-of-service-attacks, all of which have been used to target journalists and election officials in numerous countries.
The Daily Beast’s Nico Hines reflects on his now-retracted story about hook-ups during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Hines had created accounts on Grindr and Tinder in order to report the story, and did not identify himself as a journalist. “Before writing this story, I didn’t appreciate what ‘check your privilege’ truly meant,” Hines writes. “I was insensitive to the fears that constantly grip some people’s lives and it was wrong to even introduce the possibility that someone’s privacy could have been compromised.” Hines’s apology also serves as an announcement of his return to the website after “a lengthy period of intense reflection.”
Elif Batuman talks to LitHub about adolescence, Russian literature, and reader expectations. Batuman modeled the events in her new book, The Idiot, on stories like Anna Karenina, which toyed with with readers’ assumptions of what would or wouldn’t happen. “One reader was very angry with me,” Batuman remembers. “‘I spent the whole book waiting for them to have sex,’ she told me. She looked at me like she was asking what do you have to say for yourself?”
At Business Insider, Oliver Darcy looks at Independent Journal Review’s “identity crisis.” The website has come under greater scrutiny since White House reporter Erin McPike was chosen as the only journalist to accompany Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on his trip to Asia. Originally focused on generating content that would engage right-wing readers, the company has struggled to merge its original concept with the more journalistic, news-driven work that it does now, especially after the departure of editor in chief Bubba Atkinson. “Bubba was steering it toward more in the middle of the road. Not this crazy conservative bulls—-,” one anonymous source said. “And I think we were really f—-ing close. We almost got there. The clicks—the money probably was a deciding factor in why things didn’t end up eventually getting there.”
In the New York Times’s “By the Book” column, Fran Lebowitz takes issue with the request that she suggest her favorite book that no one has heard of. “How do I know what no one else has heard of?” she asks. “I can name books that I think are fairly obscure. I could say Henry Green. But now, as of last summer, everyone is reading Henry Green.”
Tonight at McNally Jackson, Christian Lorentzen talks to Edmund Gordon about his recent biography of Angela Carter.