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Maurice Carlos Ruffin on white supremacy; The "democratic emergency" of media layoffs

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

At the Paris Review, Peyton Burgess talks to Maurice Carlos Ruffin about survivalists, white supremacy, and his new book, We Cast a Shadow. “The thing is, I believe that America is the greatest country on earth, yet we always have multiple layers of injustice that are operating at any given time,” Ruffin said. “When I was writing this book in 2012, President Obama was constantly shipping immigrants out of the country. Now it’s to the point of taking kids from their parents—and for half of America that’s still no big deal.”

LitHub’s Gabrielle Bellot reflects on Edwidge Danticat, Albert Camus, and “the art of exile.”

Cameron Shenassa looks at the “new literature of the Midwest,” found in books like Ling Ma’s Severance, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States, and Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, that “go beyond nostalgia to look toward the future.”

The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan detailsthe problems with the “middle-lane” or “both sides” style of news reporting. “Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage,” she writes. “But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.”

“Coming in a time of economic prosperity, at world-historical levels of interest in the news, last week’s cuts tell a story of impending slow-motion doom — and a democratic emergency in the making, with no end in sight,” writes Farhad Manjoo on recent layoffs at BuzzFeed and HuffPost, among others. “The cause of each company’s troubles may be distinct, but collectively the blood bath points to the same underlying market pathology: the inability of the digital advertising business to make much meaningful room for anyone but monopolistic tech giants.”