Former New Republic owner and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is reportedly shopping a book on wealth imbalance and the American economy. In We Should All Be So Lucky: Notes on Fortune, Hard Work, and the Basic Income, Hughes writes that the solution to rapidly increasing inequality in the US could be solved by creating a universal basic income for “all working middle class and poor Americans who make less than $75,000 a year.” Hughes’s pitch to prospective publishers includes his “personal connections” to journalists, but The Washingtonian writes Hughes may be overlooking one issue: “A remarkable number of former TNR staffers review books.”
Thinx co-founder and “She-E.O.” Miki Agrawal is writing a second book. Disrupt-Her, “a personal development manifesto” will be published by Hay House.
Jess Zimmerman has been named editor in chief of Electric Literature. A founding editor of Archipelago and a contributing editor to Atlas Obscura, Zimmerman’s essays and criticism have been published at Catapult, Slate, and elsewhere.
The Bank of England unveiled its new £10 bill featuring Jane Austen yesterday. The note features a line from Pride and Prejudice: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” The Guardian points out that, ironically, “the words were spoken by one of Austen’s most deceitful characters, Caroline Bingley, who has no interest in books.”
At the New Yorker, Hua Hsu explains how the work of political and cultural theorist Stuart Hall created the field of Cultural Studies, and why the professor’s work resonated with American academics. “Hall was interested in the experience of being alive during such disruptive times,” Hsu writes. “What is culture, he proposed, but an attempt to grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly possible?”