In her acceptance speech last night for the Cecile B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep criticized president-elect Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrants, people with disabilities, and the press. Streep asked her cohorts to join her in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists: “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage."
Facebook has hired former NBC and CNN newscaster Campbell Brown as the company’s head of news partnerships. Brown was most recently the cofounder of The 74, an education-news website funded by secretary of education nominee Betsy DeVos. The Huffington Post digs into Brown’s Republican party connections, but Slate points out that Brown’s job won’t involve editorial control over the social media site. According to Will Oremus, Brown will act as “an envoy to the media” and not as an editor. “In other words,” Oremus writes, “it would be a mistake to read this as an acknowledgement on Facebook’s part that it bears editorial responsibility for the contents of its news feed.”
The Atlantic will print 40,000 more copies of its January/February issue, featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article on President Obama, due to popular demand.
At the Los Angeles Times, Hugo award-winner John Scalzi notes that Donald Trump and his administration are not popular with artists and other creative types—”the difficulty Trump is having in finding performers for his inauguration is only the most obvious manifestation of this”—and many of his planned acts as president, like repealing the Affordable Care Act, will greatly affect them. To combat the “mental tailspin” caused by the election, Scalzi offers a “10-point plan” for artists trying to work during the Trump administration.
Ayelet Waldman talks to The Guardian about the aftereffects of her thirty-day experiment with microdosing LSD, chronicled in her new book A Really Good Day. Waldman tells Rachel Cooke that although she’s no longer microdosing, she’s still feeling some of the benefits. “If someone sends her a mean tweet in the coming weeks,” Cooke writes, Waldman “is unlikely to respond as venomously as she might once have done, or even at all.” At the Times, Waldman says that her children were less concerned with the legality of her personal drug use than they were about how it would affect their reputations at school. Her youngest son worried that his middle-school classmates would tease him, “saying, ‘Your mom’s on acid,’” to which “his older sister, who’s two years older, said: ‘No, this is a good thing. It might not be so great in eighth grade, but when you get to ninth grade, you’re going to be so cool.’”
