Under the unassuming headline “announcement,” the London Review of Books has revealed that its legendary editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, is retiring after more than forty years. Deputy editor Jean McNicol and senior editor Alice Spawls will be taking over for Wilmers. The new editors said: “The LRB is the best paper in the world, thanks to Mary-Kay, and we intend to keep it that way. We’ve never wanted to work anywhere else, and indeed neither of us ever has.” For more on Wilmers’s career as a writer and editor, see Kaitlin Phillips's review of Wilmers’s collected essays in the Dec/Jan 2020 issue of Bookforum, and the New York Times’s profile from 2019.
Facebook is said to be creating a newsletter platform for independent writers.
Jenny Singer looks at the women of Wikipedia. Singer writes: “The women behind Wikipedia believe it will continue to be a force for good, despite all they have weathered as its custodians.” In the latest issue of Bookforum, Rebecca Panovka also looks at the online encyclopedia and its continuing inequities: “If Wikipedia is a test case for techno-utopianism, it is also a test case for an older ideology similarly unfashionable these days—your garden-variety Enlightenment-era liberalism.”
Michael Lewis discusses his new nonfiction book, The Premonition, in which COVID-19 is just a test run for the more-deadly pandemics to come. Following a biochemist, a government official, and a health worker, the book tracks the disastrously inadequate response to the pandemic last spring. Still, Lewis puts an optimistic spin on the current and coming catastrophes: “It’s a superhero story where the superheroes seem to lose the war, but all they’ve lost is a battle . . . There’s a war they’re going to win.”
Mark your calendars: On Tuesday, February 9th, Politics and Prose bookstore is hosting a virtual event for the literary-fiction anthology Kink, featuring contributors R. O. Kwon, Garth Greenwell, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alexander Chee.
