paper trail

PEN America announces judges and nominees for 2019 Literary Awards; Slate union authorizes strike

Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Photo: Sue Kwon

“In its highest forms, influence . . . derives from courage,” Time magazine editor Edward Felsenthal writes in his announcement of “The Guardians” as 2018’s Person of the Year. “Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md. They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.”

At Columbia Journalism Review, Mia Shuang Li details the many ways that Google’s Dragonfly project, a proposed “censorship-compliant search engine” in China, would harm journalists and “embolden other authoritarian states.”

PEN America has announced the judges and nominees for their 2019 Literary Awards. Nominees include Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, Jabari Asim’s We Can’t Breathe, and Tatyana Tolstaya’s Aetherial Worlds. Winners will be announced in February.

Next year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction judges have been chosen. Peter Florence, Liz Calder, Guo Xiaolu, Afua Hirsch, and Joanna MacGregor will choose next year’s winner.

Indie pop duo Tegan and Sara are writing a joint memoir. High School will be published by MCD (part of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) next fall.

Members of Slate’s editorial union have voted to allow a strike if necessary, Bloomberg reports. On Twitter, writer Jordan Weissmann explained that the vote came after the company refused to remove “right-to-work” language from employee contracts. “Slate is not ideologically rigid. But we are, overall, a progressive publication,” he wrote. “I think our audience expects the whole magazine to reflect those values, not just what we write.”