The National Book Awards Rafia Zakaria weighs in on the hypocrisy of terrorism reporting. Comparing the coverage of Dylan Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine people in a church and has been dubbed a “domestic terrorist”—a meaningless designation under US law—to reporting on attacks by muslims, Zakaria writes: “Journalists are deeply committed to the First Amendment freedoms that permit them to do their jobs. Yet they have failed to explore how First Amendment protections are being disparately applied, exacerbating the threat posed by one group and underplaying another.” The paper is the first in a series of three by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, a collection of George W. Bush’s paintings of veterans and soldiers, will be published next February.
The Brooklyn Book Festival starts this weekend—see all of Sunday’s events here. Tonight’s Bookend events include the New York Review of Books’s Darryl Pinckney and the New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham in conversation at the Weeksville Heritage Center; a panel moderated by n+1’s Nikil Saval on political reporting; and writers Rivka Galchen and Heidi Julavits on motherhood and writing.