Reader-supported press organization Shadowproof has announced the launch of its Marvel Cooke Fellowship, which will support writers of color covering the movement toward prison abolition.
Here are the odds for the six novels up for this year’s Booker Prize, as aggregated by NicerOdds. The winner will be announced Thursday at 2 PM EST.
At Vulture, Sarah Jones wonders who the Netflix adaptation of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is for. Reviewing the book when it came out, Jones called Vance’s volume “poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message”; in Jones’s estimation, the movie may be even worse. She notes that films like this are never for the people they depict, instead, they offer a twisted fable for the well—or at least better—off: “Viewers want to look at the hillbilly and reassure themselves they are not that. After all, they’d vote for Obama a third time if they could. Located beyond the reach of reason or society, the hillbilly is pure white id. He’s also a fiction.”
Poet Kima Jones, founder of a publicity firm primarily serving women authors of color, has sold her memoir to Knopf. Butch is set to publish next fall.
Public Books has started a news series, “Crisis Cities,” that addresses 2020’s multiple calamities and their effect on urban life. First up, anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla writes about how, in Puerto Rico, the pandemic feels like a continuation of “a long-running drama that has featured hurricanes, earthquakes, mass uprisings against government corruption, and years of austerity measures and colonial governance.” Also in the series, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on why we need to “Defund the Police and Refund the Communities,” Mustafa Dikeç on the politics of rage, and Margaret O’Mara on working from home.
Becca Rothfeld has joined The Point as a contributing editor.
“Fresh out of the academic oven” is a collection of over ninety short pieces responding to the election results by numerous scholars, all written for a general audience. At NiemanLab, Joshua Benton selects several that might be of interest to the media set.
