In light of the controversy about The Observer’s recent piece about New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman (considered a Trump-ordered takedown by many), Jack Shafer writes: “If an editor can’t commission a hatchet job, or at the very least encourage a reporter to take a preferred direction, what’s the point of being an editor? Excessive fairness provides only one path to truth, and one man’s smear is often another man’s exuberant truth-telling.” Meanwhile, Gawker has uncovered emails showing just how the story developed, concluding that it was motivated, at least in part, by Schneiderman’s hostility toward Trump.
As the New York Times points out, “paper is a star of this year’s Whitney Biennial,” which opens next Friday. In addition to a series of short books that has been created by Semiotext(e) specifically for the event (contributors include Lynne Tillman, Eileen Myles, Gary Indiana, Dodie Bellamy, and many others), there will be exhibits featuring the diaries of editor-artist Etel Adnan and the spiral notebooks of author David Foster Wallace.
Matthew Zadrozny, whose
Yesterday, Al Jazeera announced a “Global Day of Action,” in which journalists from around the world advocated for the release of three Al Jazeera reporters—Peter Greste, Baher Mohamed and Mohammed Fahmy—who have been imprisoned in Cairo since December. As part of the protest, many of the prisoners’ supporters have been posing with signs reading \#FreeAJStaff.
Blake Bailey has written the definitive biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates, and, most recently, of Charles Jackson (who wrote The Lost Weekend)—all writers, and all of whom struggled with addiction. Now, he’s telling his own life story, and that of his troubled brother, Scott.
“Please cable 2000 dollars in pounds to me”: George Prochnik, author of the forthcoming book Impossible Exile, has posted a photo of a message that Stefan Zweig sent to Viking Press, his American Publisher, in 1933.
