Time has released its annual 100 Most Influential List. This year, each honoree’s blurb was written by another influential person—Barack Obama wrote about the Parkland students, Mindy Kaling wrote on Issa Rae, and Lee Daniels wrote about Jesmyn Ward. But, as GQ’s Jay Willis notes, “the brand of praise bestowed upon a given cultural luminary by a peer can reveal as much about the author as it does about their assigned subject,” particularly in the case of Donald Trump, who was written up by Ted Cruz. Cataloging the numerous insults and slights leveled against Cruz by Trump over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, Willis writes that Cruz “is stuck in a strange limbo, leaning into petty humiliations like this one in the hopes that proximity to the Oval Office might feel half as good as being it it himself.”
Former Harper’s Magazine editor James Marcus expands on his recent firing in an interview with the New York Times.
Blumhouse Productions have bought the screen rights to William Brennan’s New York magazine article, “Worst Roommate Ever.” Brennan will be an executive producer on both the television and film projects based on the piece, which follows the story of Jamison Bachman, “a notorious serial squatter and the ultimate Craigslist nightmare.”
Novelist and Go Home! editor Rowan Hisayo Buchanan talks to Tin House about being an Ace Hotel writer-in-residence, writing rituals, and her audience, both real and imagined.
CNN’s Jake Tapper explains why publishing a novel is more nerve-wracking than being on TV every night. “People are either going to like this book or they’re going to hate this book, and it’s all me one way or the other,” he told the Times. “You write a story, you do a TV show, and if people don’t like it, well, you’re going to do it again tomorrow. This is years of work.”
