Jonathan Cape has announced a new novel by Salman Rushdie that will cover the last eight years of US politics. The Golden House tells the story of an “American filmmaker whose involvement with a secretive, tragedy-haunted family teaches him how to become a man,” and will incorporate numerous recent political events and trends, including the inauguration of Barack Obama, the rise of the Tea Party, Gamergate, debates about identity politics, and “the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair.” The book will be released in September.
Senator Elizabeth Warren will write a book about “how corporations and financial institutions have overpowered” the American middle class. This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan in April.
In response to the White House’s list of “undercovered” terrorist attacks around the world, the New York Times has a roundup of their coverage of each incident. Besides the fact that the list includes numerous highly-covered attacks, like the bombing of the Brussels airport and the truck attack in Nice, France, Max Fisher and Kitty Bennett write, “just as striking was what the list excluded: attacks targeting Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Islamist terrorism victims.” The administration’s list also failed to include attacks committed by non-Muslims. “By focusing on a significant but narrow slice of terrorism,” Fisher and Bennett write, the White House “risks feeding into perceptions that the administration is seeking to target Muslims with other policies.”
The Times has hired Rebecca Blumenstein as deputy managing editor. Blumenstein worked for over twenty years as an editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal. The Times is also looking for a full-time theater critic to replace Charles Isherwood, who announced his departure from the paper yesterday.
Lydia Polgreen, the new editor of the Huffington Post, told CNN that she wants the website to reach out to “people who feel that the fundamental political and economic power arrangements are unfair,” which “includes a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump.” Through new hires and restructuring, Polgreen hopes to turn the website into a publication similar to the “classic tabloid that everybody from the janitor to the CEO would read.”
In a radio interview with conservative talk show host Michael Medved, deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka said that the White House will not stop referring to negative articles about the administration as fake news until the media stops criticizing the president and his policies. "There is a monumental desire on behalf of the majority of the media . . . to attack a duly elected President in the second week of his term," Gorka said. “Until the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say, 'fake news.'”
