After facing criticism for publishing a first-person essay by Jian Ghomeshi, Ian Buruma has left the New York Review of Books, the New York Times reports. Buruma told Dutch website Vrij that he felt forced to resign after publisher Rea Hederman “made clear to me that university publishers, whose advertisements make publication of The New York Review of Books partly possible, were threatening a boycott. They are afraid of the reactions on the campuses, where this is an inflammatory topic.” Buruma feels that his decision to step down “is a capitulation to social media and university presses.” On Twitter, Jia Tolentino notes that though Buruma may blame a “frenzy of histrionic women” for his departure, “the Ghomeshi essay & Slate interview added up to a truly abysmal professional performance: you can’t be a good editor with such pathological distance from the texture of the world.”
Former Harper’s Magazine managing editor Hasan Altaf talks to the Huffington Post about staff reactions to recent articles by John Hockenberry and Katie Roiphe. “I felt like it was inappropriate, to use a mild word, to give him the platform of Harper’s,” he said. “This to me seems like the time to give a platform to people on the other end of this, because it is more important to hear from them, and they generally don’t have the same access to platforms like this.”
St. Martin’s Press is publishing a book by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump will hit shelves this December.
Time editor in chief Edward Felsenthal talks to Columbia Journalism Review about its recent sale and the future of the magazine. Felsenthal is excited about working with the magazine’s new owners, Marc and Lynne Benioff. “One of the things that is so wonderful about the Benioffs is that they’ve made clear that they believe in high quality journalism,” he said. “I think we’re well-positioned for the future because of that.” At the Times, Marc Benioff tells Kara Swisher that he sees the company as a start-up: “They have been opportunity constrained . . . but we are here to unshackle them.”
The Nation has hired Pitchfork’s Kevin Lozano as its assistant literary editor. Lozano will start at the magazine in October.
The Forward Prize for poetry has been awarded to Danez Smith for the collection Don’t Call Us Dead. At twenty-nine, Smith is the youngest winner in the prize’s history.
At Lithub, Elizabeth Metzger, Max Ritvo’s classmate and literary executor, remembers working with the late poet on what would become The Final Voicemails. “The poems in The Final Voicemails expose the machinery of the creative mind at work.They glitter with this intense and darker drive to enter the posthumous realm,” she writes. “Max’s project was clear: to imagine a world without him.”
Tonight at Verso Books in Brooklyn, Crashed author Adam Tooze and Globalists author Quinn Slobodian discuss the financial crash, neoliberalism, and their books with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.