At the Columbia Journalism review, Todd Gitlin wonders if the news media has learned the right lessons from their mistakes covering the 2016 presidential race: “Learning trivial lessons will not do for 2020. The dishonor and depredations of the Trump presidency expose every single one of the institutions that enabled his rise from tabloid celebrity to apprentice celebrity to full-blown commander of recklessness and untruth.”
Poynter has an ambitious new four-part series about Southern newspapers in the era between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. Some of these publications are now apologizing for their racist and white supremacist coverage. Mark I. Pinsky talks to journalists, historians, and others to examine what these apologies mean now and what lessons today’s journalists can learn.
On the Reading Women podcast, hosts Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett talk to Emily Bell, the editor of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women.
At the New Yorker, Lauren Groff discusses her story “Brawler,” which was published in this week’s issue: “A story is only a fragment of a character’s life, and it’s true that this fragment shows a terrible time for Sara. But, like all people, she’s more than just the worst moment in her life.”
In the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews an urgent new book about the myths of domestic violence, No Visible Bruises, by Rachel Louise Snyder. Sehgal praises the book for using novelistic techniques to create reportage that reads as a call-to-action: “This is a writer using every tool at her disposal to make this story come alive, to make it matter.”
Tonight at Symphony Space, Mark Karr and Celeste Ng host an evening of “selected shorts” about motherhood.
