If the original Congressional Commission had been present for Trump’s second impeachment, writes David Remnick at the New Yorker, it probably would have, like the majority of Republicans in the Senate, voted to acquit. “But history—history as it is assembled through the rigorous accumulation and analysis of fact—will not be so forgiving….” At The Atlantic, Trumpocalypse author David Frum writes of the acquittal: “You say that you are disappointed? That a mere rebuke was not enough? That justice was not done? It wasn’t. But now see the world from the other side, through the eyes of those who defend Trump or even want him to run again. Their hope was to dismiss this impeachment as partisan, as founded on fake evidence, as hypocritical and anti-constitutional—to present this verdict as an act of oppression by one half of the country against the other. That hope was banished today.”
Investigative journalist and author James Ridgeway—a longtime contributor for the Village Voice and the New Republic—has died at age eighty-four. He took on many topics: neo-Nazis (Blood in the Face), environmentally harmful corporations, DC political corruption, and prisons that continued to use solitary confinement. Robert D. McFaddon writes in the Times: “Mr. Ridgeway attacked malfeasance and skulduggery in American life with a passion, as one critic put it, ‘so earnest and straightforward that he can make a lengthy explanation of sewage interesting.’”
After a ten-month break, author and music critic Robert Christgau has revived his Auriculum podcast. The new episode features Christgau talking with Rob Sheffield (Bowie, Dreaming the Beatles) and Joe Levy about Josie and the Pussycats and the best music of 2020.
Book deals: Knopf has acquired Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, an expanded version of her New Yorker essay; the book, which the publisher describes as a work of “meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of her father’s death,” will be released on May 11. Viking has purchased Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, which will be released in September.
Reading events: Thursday evening at 7:30 EST, Patricia Lockwood will discuss her new novel, No One Is Talking about This, with Heidi Schreck. You can register for the online event here.
