Laura van den Berg talks to the Paris Review about tourism, zombies, and her latest novel, The Third Hotel. Van den Berg says that she started writing the book while living in a possibly-haunted home at Bard College. “I had been bouncing around between various campuses for a few years and that winter I was on the road a lot because I had just put out my first book and my husband and I were spending too much time apart and my father was ill—life felt so transient, as if everything was moving too quickly for me to absorb anything,” she said. “So the book sprung from a tangle of chaotic feelings—plus an attic ceiling that would unfold itself in the middle of the night.”
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore, has been banned in Hong Kong for obscenity.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is working on a limited series for FX based on Sam Wasson’s biography of filmmaker Bob Fosse.
At Book Marks, Amitava Kumar shares “his list of five books about finding love.”
US Olympic Fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad talks to the New York Times about death threats, competition, and her new memoir, Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream.
In a memo written in March and obtained yesterday by BuzzFeed News, outgoing chief security officer Alex Stamos implored Facebook employees to prioritize user privacy and safety over profits. “We need to listen to people (including internally) when they tell us a feature is creepy or point out a negative impact we are having in the world,” Stamos wrote. “We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to be open, honest and transparent about our challenges and what we are doing to fix them.” Yesterday, Facebook decided that a livestreamed rant by Alex Jones of Infowars, in which he leveled unfounded accusations of pedophilia and threatened violence against Robert Mueller, was not in violation of the company’s policies.