Last night at the Republican National Convention, Jon Stewart took over the desk at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to deliver a Daily Show–style monologue ridiculing Donald Trump, the Republican party, and Fox News. The New York Times has a full transcript of Stewart’s remarks, which he kicked off with: “I thought Donald Trump was going to speak. Ivanka said that he was going to come out. She said he was really compassionate and generous, but then this angry groundhog came out and he just vomited on everybody for an hour.”
The New Yorker has a sensitive account of the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Daniel Wenger reports from Orlando, registering the subdued scene at the city’s oldest gay club, visiting an undocumented immigrant convalescing in a hospital, and attending the funeral of a twenty-six-year-old Dominican man named Oscar Aracena-Montero. “In Hispanic countries and Latin-American communities, where conservative family values still prevail, gay lives are often lived at least partially under the radar,” he writes. “For many of the survivors, the massacre seemed to deliver multiple blows: first the violence of the attacks, and then the intrusions, however well-meaning, of neighbors, police officers, federal investigators, journalists.”
Prison authorities have recommended that Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose handwritten prison journal Guantánamo Diary was published in 2015, be released. Once free, Slahi hopes to “start a business and write books.”
Biteback Publishing has acquired imprisoned Turkish journalist Can Dündar’s new book, We Are Arrested: A Journalist’s Notes from a Turkish Prison. Dündar was arrested in November after the newspaper he edited, Cumhuriyet, ran an exposé on illegal arms shipments from the Turkish government to Syrian rebels.
Catapult has just published Watchlist, a new anthology of writing about surveillance. Contributors include Etgar Keret, T. C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, and others.
Natalie Portman isn’t the only A-list actress to be experimenting with a role behind the camera: Actress Kirsten Dunst is set to direct an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Dunst cowrote the screenplay; Dakota Fanning will star as Plath’s alter ego Esther Greenwood. In other adaptation news, Donna Tartt’s bestselling book, The Goldfinch, is being made into a movie by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy screenwriter Peter Straughan and Brooklyn director John Crowley. Natasha Vargas-Cooper offers some help with casting.
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell is one of the headliners at the OZY Fusion Fest, an all-day food-music-comedy-ideas event that will take place in New York on Saturday. According to the website, Gladwell will open the festivities with a keynote speech, about “America and the world . . . at a cultural crossroads.”
