This Thursday at the Brooklyn Public Library, contributors to Choice Words, a collection of literature on abortion, will discuss their work with editor Annie Finch. Mahogany Brown, Desiree Cooper, Camonghe Felix, Kristen Ghodsee, Katha Pollitt, and Manisha Sharma will participate in the discussion.
In the new issue of Harper’s, Daniel Bessner writes about how streaming and conglomeration have hollowed out Hollywood and made middle-class film and TV writing jobs a thing of the past. The industry today increasingly favors adapting existing IP and avoids risk whenever possible. “It seems like buyers are much less adventurous,” one writer told Bessner. “Buyers are looking for Friends.”
At The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim report on a leaked memo from New York Times top editors instructing “journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land.” “Despite the memo’s framing as an effort to not employ incendiary language to describe killings ‘on all sides,’ in the Times reporting on the Gaza war,” Grim and Scahill write, “such language has been used repeatedly to describe attacks against Israelis by Palestinians and almost never in the case of Israel’s large-scale killing of Palestinians.”
Issue 47 of n+1 magazine is out now, with contributions by Nicole Lipman, Kay Gabriel, Iman Mersal, Paul Soto, Saree Makdisi, and more. In the Intellectual Situation, the editors write about images of genocide: “The people of Gaza showed the world what the mainstream media could not. . . . The bombardment has not stopped, and so the images have not stopped.”
The New Republic has started “Does It Hold Up?,” a new series of essays revisiting classic works. In the first installment, Samuel Clowes Huneke reminds us that Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is a work of Marxist scholarship. Anderson’s goal “was to explain nationhood from a Marxist perspective, to understand how the same economic forces that inform socialist thought could also be leveraged to explain nationalism.”
The Los Angeles Review of Books is looking for a new managing editor.
