As Time magazine’s Baltimore cover recalls 1968, a reminder to the media to think twice about misusing MLK. Historian N. D. B. Connolly has a useful op-ed on the context for events in Baltimore, while Karen Attiah imagines how Western media might cover them if they were happening elsewhere in the world.
Obama has announced a new reading scheme for low-income students: US publishers including Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster will provide $250m in free ebooks.
A year after the firing of Jill Abramson as executive editor of the New York Times, and the debate that followed, Susan Glasser of Politico has hosted a roundtable with Abramson, Slate’s chief Julia Turner and Susan Goldberg (EIC of National Geographic) about the “pipeline problem”, and why it’s still the case that fewer women than you’d expect are making it to the top jobs in journalism. A delightfully weird piece on Erik Wemple’s Washington Post blog suggests that Glasser herself (who, he notes, used to run the Post’s national news department and was removed after a year and a half) may be part of the problem: Wemple lists 29 female Politico staffers (including several in “leadership” posts) who’ve left since Glasser took over six months ago, and speculates as to why. He also includes COO Kim Kingsley’s response to his request for comment: “Your obsession with Susan is unsettling and strange. For a company loaded with top women leaders . . . your fixation on who left and when and what does it mean seems never-ending and tedious. But thank you for your intense interest in Politico.”
The Rumpus interviews Michelle Tea about writing a book in the “I used to be a wild dirt bag and then I got my shit together—here’s how I did it” genre, and the importance of finding an agent with “no illusions about how homophobic publishing is.”
Starlee Kine, one of This American Life’s most memorable contributors (who once handled a break-up by writing a pop song and playing it to Phil Collins for feedback), will be hosting a new podcast called Mystery Show. You can email [email protected] to submit your own mystery, as long as it’s definitively unGoogleable.