Jeff Sharlet, the author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy and Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between, has been covering right-wing movements in the US for years, so he knows what he’s talking about when he writes, of Donald Trump’s rise to become the Republican candidate, that “this is so much worse than most people understand.” In an article for Esquire, he gives thirteen reasons that most people are “underestimating the problem.”
The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards have been announced. Mexican author Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman, won for best novel. And Brazilian writer Angélica Freitas’s Rilke Shake, translated from Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan, won for best book of poems.
Sonya Ross, the AP’s Race and Ethnicity Editor, has sued her employer for race, sex, and age discrimination.
The Awl’s Alex Balk asks: “Do all the political analysts get fired now?” And then answers: probably not! “As it is these same puffed-up ‘analysts’ are going to get another bite at the apple with a series of ‘I was wrong about Trump—here’s why’ pieces and then pivot so quickly to issuing predictions once more that you will forget they apologized in the first place.” Meanwhile, Callum Borchers at the Washington Post writes, in the preface to a list of things many reporters got wrong in their coverage of Trump: “So now seems like a good moment to remember some of the many, many times we in the news media said this day would never come. The media folks on this list shouldn’t feel too badly; almost everyone else was wrong, too.”
Laura Miller ponders the annoying tendency to judge novelists based on their appearance, but also notes that the public, in failing to pay attention to less mediagenic authors, plays a role in the trend. “It’s hard enough to find someone who not only can write well but can also reliably produce a book that people want to read. The need for authors to be mediagenic in some fashion is nothing but an additional nuisance,” she writes. “And yet that’s often what it takes to get us, the public, to pay any attention to them at all. The way an author looks can affect how big an advance she gets, because it affects how much coverage her book gets, and that coverage affects its sales.”
New Yorkers: Tonight, Brenda Shaughnessy reads from her new book of poems, So Much Synth, at NYU.