In the New York Times, author Joyce Maynard reflects on the years she spent with J.D. Salinger (having dropped out of college in order to live with him) and casts a cool eye on his relationships with with much younger women. What troubles Maynard most about how the public has reacted to news of Salinger’s affairs is “the quiet acceptance, apparently alive and well in our culture, of the notion that genius justifies cruel or abusive treatment of those who serve the artist and his art.”
Five years after publishing The Family, a journalistic investigation into a “self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful,” Jeff Sharlet is back with an essay about Westmont College, a religious school that supplies many of the movement’s devotees.
New books by Naomi Alderman, Richard Beard, Philip Pullman, and Colm Toibin indicate that “Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction.”
The Brooklyn Institute has released its fall lineup of classes: The offerings include courses on Nietzsche and Wagner, postwar avant-garde art, and one called “Gender and Revolutions: Rethinking the ‘Women Question’ in the Modern Middle East.”
The man who invented banner ads worries to David Carr that native advertising—defined as ”advertising wearing the uniform of journalism, mimicking the storytelling aesthetic of the host site”—is going to ruin journalism.
In southern Russia, a recent argument over Kant’s 18th-century treatise A Critique of Pure Reason resulted very unreasonably in a man getting shot in a grocery store.