Yesterday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified before congress. As The Ringer writes, he’s very sorry for the company’s recent missteps and misdeeds, including the improper sharing of personal data with Cambridge Analytica. He’ll be back testifying today. The Atlantic points out the thirteen strangest moments from the first day of hearings, while at the New Yorker, Adrian Chen considers what was missing from Zuckerberg’s remarks: “Facebook’s business model and leadership structure are still there. The company is still, as Tim Wu recently pointed out in the Times, a machine for ‘maximizing the harvest of data and human attention.’”
HarperCollins has announced a new posthumous J. R. R. Tolkien book edited by the late author’s son, Christopher, to be published in August. The novel, The Fall of Gondolin, was written during World War I while Tolkien was recovering from fighting in the Battle of the Somme. John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War, describes the new work as “a quest story with a reluctant hero who turns into a genuine hero—it’s a template for everything Tolkien wrote afterwards. . . . It has a dark lord, our first encounter with orcs and balrogs—it’s really Tolkien limbering up for what he would be doing later.”
Graywolf Press is offering the Citizen Literary fellowship to encourage diversity in the publishing industry. The position is a part-time paid gig with mentoring and coaching in both editorial and marketing. Applications are due by May 4th.
The Millions has announced the longlist for the Best Translated Book Award in fiction and poetry.
For National Library week, The Paris Review Daily has a paean to the “strange magic” of libraries. Stuart Kells, author of The Library, reflects on the transcendent happenstance of the stacks: “The history of libraries is rich with stories of chance encounters with priceless manuscripts, lost letters, rare editions, and scandalous memoirs. Less illustrious discoveries are part of the everyday experience of libraries. There is a magic, too, of creation.”
Cassell books will publish a book of Morrissey photos by Kevin Cummins titled, fittingly, Alone and Palely Loitering. The volume will be published in the US in October.
