Anthony Bourdain—who became famous with his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, and went on to become the host of the CNN show Parts Unknown—has died.
In a staff memo, Reuters editor in chief Steve Adler outlined the tactics that journalists should use when reporting on Trump, based on the rules used by foreign correspondents in countries where “the media is unwelcome and frequently under attack.” “Do’s” include not worrying about official access, which was “never all that valuable anyway,” while “Dont’s” reminds reporters to not “take too dark a view of the reporting environment,” since “it’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world.”
For their reporting on Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements, Times journalists Emily Steel and Mike Schmidt have won the 2018 Livingston Award.
At BOMB, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple talk to Alia Malek about Arabic poetry, secularism, and the difficulties of writing and publishing a book about Syria for a Western audience.
Novelist Lydia Millet tells the New York Times’s By the Book column that she would want Dept. of Speculation author Jenny Offill to write her life story. “She’s strictly a fiction writer, which is actually a selling point, and she has a way of spinning the everyday into subtle gold. She could take the tawdry parts and make them seem almost tasteful, or at least forgivable, using nothing but her magic wand of words,” she said. “Also, she actually knows the tawdry parts, and you cannot have a juicy biography without those.”
Moira Donegan talks to Women & Power author Mary Beard about misogyny, past and present. Beard says that the current debate about misogyny and sexism, as well as the reaction to it from opponents, is similar to the debate in ancient times. “Like Perseus and Medusa: decapitating women, silencing women, cutting women’s tongues out. There are things that are so resonant with now,” she said. “If you look at what Twitter trolls tend to say when they want to target a woman, they go back to those tropes about cutting tongues out, cutting your head off and raping it. And I’m pretty certain that many of them have not read Ovid.”