Bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who ran for congress in California in 2014, has announced that she is running for president as a Democrat in the 2020 elections. Williamson is the author of A Return to Love, in which she reflects on the spiritual guidebook A Course in Miracles, and many other books, and has also become well known as a public speaker. Williamson is calling for a “moral and spiritual awakening in the US,” and has vowed to fight the “amoral economic system” and the “layers of systemic racism” in the US. She also believes in universal health care, free higher education, and a “green New Deal.”
Former Vanity Fair EIC Graydon Carter is launching a digital news platform called AirMail, intended for worldly cosmopolitans, with former New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley. AirMail will begin this summer, and will be sent to subscribers as a weekly newsletter. There will also be stories and podcasts on the website, AirMail.news.
Appearing at the Hay Cartagena festival in Colombia, Zadie Smith gave a talk in which she noted that “identity is a pain in the arse.” ““If someone says to me: ‘A black girl would never say that,’ I’m saying: ‘How can you possibly know?’ The problem with that argument is it assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans.” The novelist-essayist also warned her audience against using social media as a way to “know” and define others. “We are being asked to be consistent as humans over great swathes of time. People are searching through social media. But everyone is changing all the time.”
Erik Wemple imagines how the late media columnist and Night of the Gun author David Carr would respond to Trump’s claim that he’s losing money.
Between 1965 and his death in 2010, J.D. Salinger continued to write, but showed his work to no one. Now his son says that almost all of the author’s never-before-seen work is being prepared for publication. “My father was writing for fifty years without publishing,” says Matt Salinger. “That’s a lot of material.”
