NBC plans to create a new hub dedicated to the coverage of the media industry, and has hired Claire Atkinson, the former media reporter for the New York Post, to head the project. Other new hires include former Buzzfeed news editor Ben Smith and Recode editor Kara Swisher.
David Carr, who died in 2015, was known as many things—recovering addict, media columnist for the Times, author of the bestselling memoir The Night of the Gun. He was also a tough and generous mentor to many younger writers. Now, at The Atlantic, more than a dozen authors remember the role Carr played in their careers. Says Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Before I got to The Atlantic, I was bombing out of all these jobs. It was tremendously hard, and there were a lot of times when I really wanted to give up. Every time something bad happened, Carr would tell me, ‘It’s them, not you.’ I never knew David to be soft on me—he was the most difficult boss I’ve had—so when he gave encouragement, it had to be true.”
The National Book Awards has announced its longlist of contenders for its 2017 prizes in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
In response to gripes last week that Britain’s Man Booker Prize had become too interested in American authors, Alex Shephard has written an opinion piece titled “Americans Didn’t Ruin the Man Booker Prize. Book Publishers Did.”
The New York Times adds to the speculation about who will replace Graydon Carter as the editor of Vanity Fair.
Martin Amis says that comparing Trump to Hitler is off base. The US President, the novelist says, has more in common with Mussolini.
Nathan Heller considers Harvard University’s “dishonorable treatment” of Chelsea Manning and Michelle Jones. Manning was granted a fellowship by the university but saw the offer revoked after protests from former deputy director of the CIA Michael Morrell and current CIA director Mike Pompeo. Jones, who served twenty years in prison for the murder of her child, was admitted into Harvard’s history Ph.D. program, but was also disinvited after protests, suggesting that the university has been basing decisions on a wish to avoid controversy. “The Jones decision,” Heller writes, “shirks an opportunity to define what the twenty-first-century university is.”