At The Guardian, Sophie Elmhirst profiles author and biologist Richard Dawkins, who is on a “global quest to broadcast the wonder of science and the nonexistence of God.” The article presents Dawkins—whose books include The God Delusion and An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist—as a seemingly tireless and increasingly divisive scholar. “For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage.”
Rebecca Traister (the author of Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women) has announced that she is leaving the New Republic to become a writer at New York magazine.
The PEN Foundation has announced the winners of its 2015 awards: Ian Buruma’s Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadow of War, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Jack Livings’s The Dog, and others.
Evan Hughes ponders the “strange rise of the writers’ space” at the Page Turner blog. “At these urban oddities, members get access to a quiet room or two full of desks, often with an adjacent eat-in kitchen, perhaps a couch—in other words, an office. But without a boss. And you pay them, instead of the other way around.”
Yesterday in the Washington Post, Ben Terris wrote a mostly positive story about Benny Johnson, who, less than a year after he was fired from BuzzFeed amid multiple accusations of plagiarism, has found a new job as a content director for the fast-growing conservative website IJReview. But the Post story left one thing out, says Gawker: Johnson and Terris seem to be friends.
Slate has an excerpt from Nisid Hajari’s Midnight Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition. In the excerpt, Hajari explains the events that took place over a few days in 1947 that “turned Pakistan and India into sworn enemies.”