The New Republic’s Alex Shephard offers his annual predictions for who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature (and who definitely will not). It’s no easy task, as the prize’s identity has, in recent years, “become unmoored amid oddball picks (Bob Dylan), conventional ones (Olga Tokarczuk), and the literary award equivalent of begging to get ratioed on Twitter (Peter Handke). With all the left turns and overcorrections, it’s not so obvious what the Nobel Prize in literature is celebrating.” Still, Annie Ernaux seems to be the favorite for this year’s award.
Emily Stokes, editor of the Paris Review, has an update for readers about where the journal is headed: “We made the decision not to put out a Fall issue because we were feeling ambitious.” The print edition will be redesigned, and the Paris Review Podcast will return on October 27. Stokes also announces a number of new hires: Lidija Haas has joined as senior editor, Amanda Gersten is managing editor, Olivia Kan-Sperling is assistant editor, and Maya Binyam is contributing editor.
At The Atlantic, Elaine Godfrey looks into what happens when a community’s local paper is bought by a large publisher, taking Burlington, Iowa’s The Hawk Eye as an example.
In the new issue of Dissent, Timothy Shenk, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Maggie Doherty, Nils Gilman, Adam Harris, and Christopher Newfield have a roundtable discussion of how the pandemic has changed higher education in the US. McMillan Cottom notes that there is no such thing as a universal American college experience, and “most college leaders saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to do more of what they had already been doing. Schools that had wanted to respond to inequality doubled down on that. Schools that had been trending toward profit-seeking, especially under the guise of a public institution—like Purdue and Arizona State—doubled down.”
Last night, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor moderated a discussion of abolition and cultural freedom with 2020 Lannan Prize recipients Angela Y. Davis, Mike Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Their conversation was recorded and can be watched here.
