A novel Harper Lee wrote in the mid-1950s, before To Kill a Mockingbird, is going to be published this summer in a run of no fewer than two million copies. Go Set a Watchman, as the book is called, follows Mockingbird’s Scout as an adult. It was out of flashback scenes to Scout’s childhood that Mockingbird was born, on the advice of Lee’s editor.
The Financial Times will soon begin paying interns minimum wage for the first time in its history, the result of a deal brokered with Britain’s National Union of Journalists. The union promises that they will take on other employers over the issue as well: “It is vital that a modern, democratic nation has a media that reflects all its citizens and is not a redoubt of the privileged classes. The management of the mainstream media is also the loser if it is not prepared to look for talent beyond a cohort of people who looks like it.”
In the 1870s, cats were written about mainly as pests; by the 1970s, people were concerned with how they were being treated. A survey of the New York Times’ cat coverage found nearly seven hundred articles since the late nineteenth century, among them “cats versus birds, cats and women, cats as urban symbols . . . cats getting stuck and then usually extracted from almost every conceivable place—including trees, ledges, chimneys, piers, sewers, packing crates and airplane cargo holds.”
The New Left Review has an interview with Evgeny Morozov, who’s written for Bookforum in the past (on Astra Taylor). Morozov describes the evolution of his politics over the course of the years that he’s been studying the Internet. Originally, he says, he regarded himself as a social democrat, at the “pragmatic centre” of the spectrum, “content to search for better, more effective ways to regulate the likes of Google and Facebook.” But now: “I am questioning who should run and own both the infrastructure and the data running through it, since I no longer believe that we can accept that all these services ought to be delivered by the market and regulated only after the fact.”
The next issue of Charlie Hebdo will be released February 25.
At Bookends, Anna Holmes and James Parker consider whether book reviewing should be considered a public service or an art. Both come down in favor of public service. We vehemently disagree.