Melville House has announced an essay collection featuring work by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, as well as other progressive intellectuals. What We Do Now: Standing Up For Your Values in Trump’s America will be available in January.
The Guardian is forming a partnership with Vice Media. Journalists from the newspaper will work at Vice’s London offices and offer their reporting experience in exchange for Vice’s video know-how and younger audience. In an interview with Politico, Vice founder Shane Smith said post-election dysfunction could be useful to the company. “This turmoil and the generational conflict are helping us grow as a brand,” said Smith. “So we’re going to try to make the most of it.”
Flatiron Books has bought the rights to Reed King’s FKA USA. The book will be published in early 2018 and “is set in a United States whose final, disastrous president—a despotic billionaire whose self-interested rule provokes a massive civil war and the splintering of the states into individual countries—ushers in the end of the union.”
Due to an increase in racist vandalism in library books across the country since the election, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom will now keep track of such incidents in their own database.
At BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen reflects on Time’s choice of Donald Trump as “Person of the Year” for 2016, noting that even though the article about the president-elect “draws attention to the grim underside of his campaign,” most readers—along with Trump himself—won’t see past the cover image. In the Internet age, Petersen writes, “the nuance and history of ‘Person of the Year’ disappears. In its place rises Trump’s own notion that being on the cover of a magazine is tantamount to praise—as he said, ‘It’s a great honor’—or that ‘influential’ is strictly a positive term.”
At The Baffler, Chris Lehmann writes about New York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s recent comments criticizing the paper’s staff for opinionated tweets that offended Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. On Carlson’s show, Spayd told the host, “I don’t know that any of these people should be fired, but I do think that when people go over the line like that . . . there ought to be some kind of a consequence.” Lehmann notes that the public editor’s “tone-deaf chiding” points to a larger issue at the publication: “The real problem here is that these people are journalists second, and corporate managers first. . . . As shops like the Times continue to hemorrhage readers and ad revenues at an historic clip, their managers will rally by instinct to the ritual protection of the injured sensibilities of any and every reader demographic.”