The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize has been announced. Nominees include Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. The list also includes Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the prize.
Susan Fowler Rigetti, the former Uber engineer whose Medium post about sexual harassment at the company led to the firing of its CEO, is joining the New York Times as a San Francisco–based technology opinion editor.
Tronc is making severe staff cuts at the New York Daily News. The New York Times reports that 50 percent of the staff will be laid off, including editor in chief Jim Rich and managing editor Kristen Lee.
Empire Falls author Richard Russo wonders how novelists can write about school shootings in an age where they have become commonplace—and politically divisive—events. “As a nation, we have not decided that our children are more important than our guns, and any new novel on the subject will have to address that tectonic shift,” he writes. “We’ve changed. Our nation has changed. A 2018 “Empire Falls” would have to be set in a tribal America that has stopped listening, that may have little interest in a novelist’s musings.”
“A good rule of thumb in business, and in life generally, is that if you find yourself defending Holocaust deniers, you’ve probably taken a wrong turn somewhere,” writes the New Republic’s Alex Shephard on Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of why Facebook allows conspiracy theories and fake news to remain on the site. “To win points with Republicans in Congress, Facebook is courting crazies. Furthermore, by embracing the very people who make its platform toxic, it is going to alienate mainstream users and invite regulatory scrutiny from Democrats, who want to know why Facebook isn’t doing more to kick out sites like InfoWars.”