At the New Republic, Jacob Silverman writes about the economy of freelance journalism and the indignities a writer trying to scrape together a living often suffers. Silverman also notes the ways in which those who feel writing is a calling have blind spots about their own precarious situation: “Journalists can be so pious about the suffering they cover, while also wearing a protective shield of cynicism, that they excuse the material conditions of their own lives.”
Woody Allen is reportedly pitching a memoir to publishers. According to the New York Times, so far no one is interested.
In celebration World Press Freedom day, the Times is taking down its paywall for three days. The essay explaining why the paper is taking this step might strike you as a little self-aggrandizing, but the Times is nothing if not self-aware: “We are not patting ourselves on the back. These days, in fact, we may be closer to wringing our hands.”
At the London Review of Books, Jenny Turner reviews k-punk: The Collected Writings of Mark Fisher: “There’s also a scary deep in Fisher, a darkness, a left-Lacanian Real which he accessed, presumably, via Slavoj Žižek: the idea of the ‘traumatic void’, the ‘unrepresentable X’ beyond language that it is the job of ordinary reality to suppress.”
On Sunday at McNally Jackson, Lary Bloom, the biographer of Sol Lewitt, will discuss the artist with Pablo Helguera and Karen Gunderson.
