Facebook has an internal metric, “violence and incitement trends,” which has seen a 45 percent rise in recent days. The metric has apparently not been previously reported on. Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that she was heartened that Facebook monitors these trends. Still, Jankowicz stressed that it was not nearly enough: “We’re talking about the broader structure of Facebook that incentivizes these communities to organize and foster offline violence. . . . I’m not sure they have a handle on it at all. It’s a structure that they’re relying on to keep people engaged and make money these days.”
The 2020 Kirkus Prize winners have been announced: Raven Leilani has won for fiction, Mychal Denzel Smith has taken home the nonfiction honor, and Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James were awarded the young-person’s literature prize.
For the London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell watches Fox News.
Well-Read Black Girl, a nonprofit writing and reading community founded in 2015 by Glory Edim, is in the midst of its annual festival. Some of the virtual panels on offer this weekend include Kimberly Rose Drew and Jenna Wortham discussing their forthcoming collaborative book, authors Morgan Jerkins and Kaitlin Greenidge in conversation on the Great Migration, and a tribute and keynote conversation with poet Nikki Giovanni.
Bookshop.org launched its UK retail platform on Monday, and raised £12,500 on that day alone. In the United States, the site has raised over $7.5 million, which has been shared among 900 bookstores.
Today’s “preponderance of the mystical, the miraculous, and the conspiratorial may seem at odds with our supposedly rational, modern democracy,” writes Samuel Clowes Huneke at the Boston Review. But Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted Land argues that “florid eruptions of mystical thinking often accompany periods of extreme political upheaval,” by studying Nazi crimes and withcraft allegations in postwar West Germany and drawing comparisons to the magical thinking of contemporary Americans.
Tonight at 5 PM EST, Haymarket Books hosts Astra Taylor, Naomi Klein, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discussing the aftermath of the US presidential election.
