Hanif Abdurraqib talks with The Fader about the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s spring concert series, which he curated this year. The programming focuses on the oral tradition, “and I don’t just mean singing words out loud,” Abdurraqib said. “I mean folks who are using both sound and language to tell cohesive stories, be that in a very tactile sense, like Nikki Giovanni, or by stitching together narratives through a body of music, like Little Simz.”
For the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson profiles Duke University Press editor Ken Wissoker. Wilson writes, “Wissoker heads one of the few academic presses with crossover appeal: if you notice that a concept from the ivory tower is creeping onto your timeline, there is a decent chance that the idea first appeared in a Duke book under his guidance.”
Over 350 staffers at Conde Nast have written a letter to management saying they plan to unionize with the NewsGuild of New York and asking for voluntary recognition. The organizing effort comes in the wake of the New Yorker’s successful unionization last summer.
Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove Alantic headed by the author of Bad Feminst, Hunger, An Untamed State and other titles, has announced its first three books. Ani Kayode Somtochukwu’s debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, will be published in June; J.V. Lyon’s literary romance Lush Lives is coming in August, and Lindsay Hunter’s thriller Hot Springs Drive will debut in November.
The New York Times profiles Rumble, the video-sharing site backed by Donald Trump and Peter Thiel, as it tries to build an alternative to YouTube. The company, based in Toronto, says it is “immune from cancel culture,” and right-wing content has thrived there. Still, chief executive Chris Pavlovski claims that the site was not meant to favor conservatives, saying, “There is no ideology here. If anything, we’re just neutral.”
For n+1, novelist Amit Chaudhuri writes about T. S. Eliot, the Bhagavad Gita, and poetry.
