Authors and critics, including Nadia Owusu, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Ayad Akhtar, share their year in reading at The Millions.
Takashi Oka, former Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times and representative in Washington of Japan’s Liberal Party, has died at the age of ninety-six.
At the New York Review of Books, Batya Ungar-Sargon looks back at Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, the country’s first penny press, and popular journalism’s blue-collar origins: “More than promoting any particular ideology, the penny press made visible New Yorkers who weren’t people of means. Rather than shaping a particular constituency or politics, it brought to life and solidified the idea of constituency, of a civil society, the idea of the public as such.”
Axios has bought the Charlotte Agenda, a digital startup, as part of an effort, in Charlotte Agenda publisher Ted Williams’s words to “bring its successful model to local markets across the country.”
Lauren Kwei, the New York paramedic who was outed in a New York Post story as supplementing her income with sex work through an OnlyFans account, talks to Rolling Stone about the experience. Kwei details how she found out the Post was doing a story about her, on a call with reporter Dean Balsamini: “After I gave him a brief history of myself, only then did he disclose that somebody had given a tip to the New York Post that I was a New York City paramedic that had an OnlyFans. I actually began crying on the phone with them because I was just so stunned. I asked him if he was allowed to use all of this information without my permission. And he said yes. And he basically told me, like, we’re going to run the story with or without your say. And so the quotes in the article are me defending myself to him, not me necessarily taking part in the interview.”
Tobi Haslett introduces readers to a new collection of poems by Thulani Davis, excerpted at The Nation: “These are backstage poems. By which I mean that they issue from a place of sophisticated doubleness, slung between intimate complication and the blast of political life.”
The founding editors of Spiegel & Grau, Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, are reviving the imprint as an independent publishing house.
