A trailer for Noah Bambauch’s film adaptation of Don DelIllo’s 1985 novel White Noise is out now. The Netflix movie will star Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle and will open at the Venice International Film Festival on August 31.
At the Paris Review Daily, Haley Mlotek curses her least favorite month: “In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom.”
For Vox, Constance Grady argues that Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster used incompetence as a defense in the antitrust trial that will decide whether the mega-publishers can merge. To rebut the government’s case, Grady writes, the publishers “had to present themselves as essentially incompetent gamblers, risking the company’s money in an industry no one could predict, all for the sheer love of literature.”
Ed Simon offers a wide-ranging essay on errors, editing, and control in writing: “Literature’s history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos. It’s the shadow narrative of expression—how we fail because of sloppiness, or ignorance, or simple tiredness.”
The Nation has named Chris Lehmann as its Washington DC bureau chief. The former New Republic, Baffler, and Bookforum editor says his approach to covering politics will avoid horse-race distractions and instead focus on “how to resist the nation’s slide into white nationalist oligarchy, and about how to make our sclerotic, antidemocratic federal institutions responsive to the people’s real demands for representation and justice.”
