The New York Times 100 notable books of the year list has been published. Time magazine and Publishers Weekly have also announced their picks for best books of 2017.
The Los Angeles Times Guild (a unionizing effort at the paper) has published an op-ed saying that their parent company, Tronc, has plenty of money to fund the benefits and raises that the union is pursuing. The Guild dug into Tronc’s finances, singling out the high salary of CEO Justin Dearborn and other top brass, the cost of one executive’s private jet, and the excessive amount of money the company spends on tickets to sporting events. The Guild writes, “If executives were paid more in line with their industry peers, the savings alone would finance thousands of dollars in annual raises, lower out-of pocket healthcare costs, accrued vacation (that was taken away unilaterally), and perhaps even lower parking fees.” For more on the Los Angeles Times’s unionizing effort, read Shaya Tayefe Mohajer’s recent article “The LA Times flirts with unionization, defying its history” at the Columbia Journalism Review.
At the New Republic, Sarah Jones reviews the new edition of The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin’s 2011 study of conservatism. Jones writes that Robin’s book explains figures like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump—who are usually viewed as outliers—as firmly in the mainstream conservative tradition.
Dr. Edward Herman, who coauthored the influential media manifesto Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky, has died at the age of ninety-two.
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1964 dream diary, in which he recorded sixty-four of his nighttime visions on index cards, will be published next Tuesday. In the journal, Nabokov tested a curious theory—which he had picked up from philosopher John Dunne—that dreams were a place where time ran backwards so that future events caused earlier dreams.
