For The Nation, Chalay Chalermkraivuth interviews Pop Song author Larissa Pham about desire, survivorship, and the importance of vulnerability to her writing. Pham sees the rise in defensive posturing in criticism and on social media—“a relatively recent phenomenon”—as a sign that stakes are missing from the argument. “Stakes are what make you care about something. They are what allow you to know what people value. So showing my stakes is what I can do to push back against that.”
Jewish Currents assistant editor Joshua Leifer is writing a book on “the state of American Jewish identity as the pillars are tested by the receding salience of Holocaust memory and by political polarization on Israel/Palestine.”
Rumaan Alam revisits Jean Stafford’s first novel, Boston Adventure, for the New York Review of Books: “These days, Stafford’s submergence into psyche is so démodé as to feel refreshing, a contrast to what often seems the default obliqueness of the contemporary novel. So much fiction today takes on faith that people are inexplicable; it’s bracing to be with a writer determined to try to explain them.”
The Associated Press has fired news associate Emily Wilder, a decision apparently “connected to tweets of hers referencing her advocacy for the Palestinian people and opposition to the actions of the Israeli government,” the Washington Post reports. Wilder, who is Jewish, worked at AP for only sixteen days before her position was terminated, and believes that the decision came in response to critiques in conservative outlets of social media posts Wilder had made while in college. Of AP’s “nebulous” social media policies, which forbid employees from sharing political opinions, Wilder noted that “they can be selectively enforced ... in a way that polices and harms the most vulnerable journalists among us.”
For Frieze, Julie Mullié writes about an exhibition of writer and photographer Anne Turyn’s 1978–1991 chapbook series “Top Stories,” which featured issues devoted to Constance DeJong, Pati Hill, Laurie Anderson, and Kathy Acker.
In the Yale Review—which launched its redesigned website this week—Becca Rothfeld writes about stalking a woman online and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona: “As any connoisseur of the practice colloquially called ‘online stalking could tell you, there is a special thrill involved in speaking to someone who cannot hear you.”
