At the New Yorker, author Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror) talks with Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) about class inequality in the US, the New York Times’ reporting of the 2008 financial crisis, good versus bad solidarity, the coronavirus, environmental collapse, and the author’s (guarded) hope for the future.
James Fallows, a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and the author of Our Towns and China Airborne, has started a list of writers and people in the media who have called on news outlets to “please stop live coverage” of Trump’s “briefings,” which are “49% misinformation and evasion about the virus, 51% campaign-rally attacks on Biden, the press, any critics, etc. It is public-service malpractice to run this live. Cable channels, talking to you.”
The Strand Bookstore confirmed yesterday that it has laid off 188 employees, more than half its staff. The news came just before Governor Cuomo’s PAUSE executive order, which requires the closing of many stores in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, went into effect. According to Rebecca McCarthy, who wrote about workers at the Strand in 2018, it’s “important to note that the owner, Nancy Bass, is a multi-millionaire” and that she owns the bookstore’s building.
Poet and memoirist Molly Brodak—whose book Bandit described her childhood with her father, a bank robber in Detroit—has died.
Book deals: Little, Brown has bought world rights to New York Times reporter Max Fisher’s first book, Social Disorder. According to the publisher, the book is “a suspenseful, idea-driven narrative that uses groundbreaking research and intimate personal stories to lay bare the global crisis caused by social media giants.” The publisher adds that Social Disorder “presents a dire picture of increased xenophobia, racial and ethnic violence, and detachment, set against the background of our current political climate.” Hachette Books has paid six figures for New Scientist reporter Debora MacKenzie’s Covid-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One. Journalist Pamela Colloff has sold her book A Deal with the Devil, “an account of America’s most prolific jailhouse informant,” to Random House.
