Journalist Adam Plowright is working on a biography of French president-elect Emmanuel Macron. The French Exception: Emmanuel Macron’s Extraordinary Rise and Risk will be published by Icon Books in September in the UK.
The Times’s David Leonhardt looks at the recent hacking attack on then-candidate Macron, and sees the situation as a lesson for American journalists. Compared to reporting on Clinton’s emails, Leonhardt writes, “France’s mainstream media showed how to exercise better judgement.” Rachel Donadio explains why the email leak didn’t influence the election. She attributes the muted effect of Macron’s email dump to the fact that there is no French version of Fox News, and considers other possible factors, such as the leak’s suspicious timing and questionable authenticity. Donadio thinks that it could be due to “a feeling among the French that, having witnessed how hacking may have altered the American election, they would not fall for the same ploy.”
At The Awl, Michael Erard reflects on the incoherency of Trump’s interview transcripts, and what we can learn from them. “A transcript offers a chance to make sense of the mud of regular talking,” he writes, “so let’s get the mud of Trump’s regular talking to work against him.”
An op-ed by the national director of anti-abortion group Human Coalition, “The Problem With Linking Abortion and Economics,” has drawn criticism on social media. At Jezebel, Stassa Edwards questions why the Times has run two separate op-eds from the group in this year alone. “As Bret Stephens’s hiring indicated, the point seems to be the Times’s ability to signal its perception of itself an embodiment the liberal value of the free exchange of ideas,” she writes. “Be it climate change or abortion, it’s the mere articulation of a side is what’s valued not the content of the arguments.”
On Twitter, readers react to the Times’s new regular feature, in which contributors “say something nice” about Trump. “The president’s flaws are well known to the readers of many mainstream media outlets,” the paper explains, so the Sunday Review column will “present things the president has said or done that are praiseworthy.” Some users have contributed their own ideas, such as “his hands are the perfect size for tweeting on his phone,” and “he hasn’t sexually assaulted any women this week. To our knowledge.”
Tonight at Books are Magic in Brooklyn, Peter Straub talks to Dan Chaon about his new novel, Ill Will.
