Rachel Kushner talks to Entertainment Weekly about art, activism, and her new book, The Mars Room. Although some recent works on the criminal justice system, like Serial and Making a Murderer, have led to activism, Kushner says that wasn’t her aim in setting The Mars Room in a women’s prison. “I don’t think art can be message-y or political,” she said. “Why not just write an op-ed? And I’m not the person to do that.”
The Washington Post‘s Jason Rezaian is joining CNN as a global affairs analyst. In his tweet announcing the new job, Rezaian, who was arrested and detained in Iran for nearly two years, wrote that the chance to work for both the paper and the news network “is one that I could have hardly imagined not too long ago.”
According to the Associated Press, “more than a year has passed since President Donald Trump held the only solo news conference of his administration” and there are no plans for one in the future. Instead, Trump relies on questions shouted at him from journalists who have been invited to observe specific events, which makes it much easier for him to “ignore questions he doesn’t like and dodge follow-ups in a way that would be glaring in a traditional news conference.”
The Pisces author Melissa Broder says that her move from poetry to prose writing was sparked by relocating to Los Angeles. “When I lived in New York, I wrote poetry on the subway,” she explained. “But when I moved to LA four years ago, I started dictating my work in my car. The line breaks disappeared and the language became more conversational. . . . The geography literally informed the text.”
At the 2018 Digital Content NewFronts, the New York Timesdiscussed its plans to move into television and film content. Assistant managing editor Sam Dolnick detailed projects that are currently in production—which include a Netflix version of the paper’s Diagnosis column on difficult medical cases and a movie based on their reporters’ coverage of Harvey Weinstein (“All the President’s Men, with three women”)—and floated ideas for future shows. “We think (dating column) Modern Love should be a series on TV,” Dolnick said. “The Crossword Puzzle. That could be a game show.”