The New Republic Union has announced that after discussions between management and Guild members, “no employee currently working in New York City will be asked to relocate and no one will lose their jobs relating to the company’s decision to increase its footprint in D.C.”
Rita Bullwinkel, author of the short story collection Belly Up, has created a “sound library” called Oral Florist, which collects recordings of artists and writers reading everyday texts out loud: Christine Schutt reads from The New England Cookbook; Deb Olin Unferth reads two certificates affixed to her refrigerator; Vi Khi Nao reads a tax document, noting, “I think the author of this text is the government of the United States.”
After the Hill Reporter broke a story about the owner of Rolling Stone’s financial ties to a Saudi Arabian state-backed investment company and Mohammed Bin-Salman, readers and journalists are calling for a boycott of the music magazine.
Lauren Williams, the former editor in chief of Vox, is starting a nonprofit newsroom called Capital B with Akoto Ofori-Atta, her longtime friend and former senior editor of The Trace. At NiemanLab, Sarah Scire interviews Williams and Ofori-Atta about their plans: “I think the reason why Akoto and I wanted to strike out independently to do this is because we want to just singularly focus on Black people. That’s never going to be — and shouldn’t be — the singular focus of a mainstream news organization. We wanted the opportunity to center Black audiences across the country and do it in a way that complements how historic Black newspapers and other ethnic media out there are doing it.”
Writer Lovia Gyarkye has been hired as a critic on arts and culture for the Hollywood Reporter. Gyarkye has previously been an editor at the New York Times for Kids, and has written for the Times, The Nation, Vogue and other publications. For the winter issue of Bookforum, she wrote about an early novel by Marie NDiaye about a vacation gone terribly wrong.
Today at 2 PM EST, Katherine Angel talks with Lauren Elkin about Angel’s book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again for Blackwell’s bookstore in the UK.
At LitHub, a look at the book deal New York Governor Andrew Cuomo got for his primer on pandemic leadership, American Crisis. As Walker Caplan writes, the Buffalo News has been asking for details about the deal since August but were met with constant delays, as the administration pleaded the difficulty of finding paperwork while working from home: “Conveniently, the documents were found and forwarded to Buffalo News just ninety minutes before the release of an explosive New York Times story that revealed the value of Cuomo’s book deal (a whopping $4 million) and that Cuomo heavily leaned on his office (both aides and junior staffers) for manuscript help, possibly violating state laws.”
