The New Republic’s Jo Livingstone talks with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, the septuagenarian electronic musician who is finally getting his due. As a child, he was “obsessed” with science fiction, especially novels “that posited the existence of silicon-based life out there in the universe, as opposed to the carbon-based life forms we are.” He first began experimenting with computers because they require silicon to function.
For the Boston Review, historian Jefferson Cowie contextualizes the white American melodrama that “the government is not just coming for your guns, it’s coming for your freedom—the freedom to dominate others.” This “racialized anti-statist brand of freedom” has been used to seize land from Native Americans, oppose civil rights, “and label Black Lives Matter as seditious.”
Samantha Power reviews The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
At the New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Marilynne Robinson, whose new novel, Jack, was published this month. Cep describes a public conversation between the novelist and President Obama—a Robinson superfan—in which the commander-in-chief ended up asking most of the questions: “In return, she almost willfully refused to ask him anything—trusting, as she always does, that if someone, even the President, has anything to say he will say it.”
At The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger offers an appreciation of editor Sir Harold Evans, who died on Wednesday at the age of ninety-two. Rusbridger notes that the circumstances that led to Evans’s storied career aren’t likely to be repeated, and remembers the late journalist’s cardinal rule: “Things are not what they seem on the surface. Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper.”
Tomorrow, Artangel and the London Review of Books will present Longplayer Assembly, a twelve-hour marathon conversation. Twenty-four participants will speak in a relay format beginning at 10 AM BST.
