The Internet is still reelingfrom Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize win yesterday. At The Telegraph, Tim Stanley says that “a culture that gives Bob Dylan a literature prize is a culture that nominates Donald Trump for president.” Luc Sante writes that this kind of outrage is nothing new when it comes to the Nobel Prize. At the New Republic, Alex Shepard admits that Dylan, whom he said could never win, is “a worthy Nobel Laureate.” Jodi Picoult wondered whether Dylan’s win made her eligible for a Grammy, while Salman Rushdie called the songwriter a “great choice.” Prolific tweeter Joyce Carol Oates called Dylan’s prize well-deserved: “Many of us are (almost literally!) haunted by Dylan music of the 1960s.” New York Timespop-music critic Jon Pareles asks, “What took them so long?” and literary critic Dwight Garner writes that Dylan’s Nobel “acknowledges what we’ve long sensed to be true: that Mr. Dylan is among the most authentic voices America has produced, a maker of images as audacious and resonant as anything in Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.” At the New Yorker, writers weigh in on their favorite Dylan lyrics, and David Remnick calls for everyone to stop bickering: “Let’s not torture ourselves with any gyrations about genre and the holy notion of literature.”
Within the Wikileaks trove of leaked Hillary Clinton emails, Quartz has tracked down the library books that Clinton requested while secretary of state—a list including Who Stole the American Dream? And The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service—while Gizmodo found an ongoing battle over email subject lines.
PublicAffairs has bought the rights to BuzzFeed reporter Albert Samaha’s book. Never Ran, Never Will follows a youth football team in Brownsville, Brooklyn and examines the issues of gentrification in urban America.
Actress Reese Witherspoon will write her first book, “inspired by the cultures of the American South.” The untitled project will be released by Touchstone in 2018.
After Donald Trump threatened to sue the Times for libel over their most recent article alleging that the candidate has sexually assaulted women, the paper’s legal team has responded with a resounding no: “Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.” Poynter explains further why a Trump would never win a libel suit against the Times. The Columbia Journalism Review talks to The Guardian’s Lucia Graves, one of the first to report on Trump’s sexual misconduct, about why these stories are just now getting significant attention: “Because a man said it. Because Trump came out in leaked video and said, in so many words, that sexual assault is something that he does regularly.”