Kathryn Schulz Kathryn Schulz may wish that Condé Nast hadn’t been so savvy about securing its cut of journalists’ film deals, because her latest New Yorker piece has the makings of a blockbuster disaster movie. Schulz describes in nightmarish detail what will happen when, quite possibly in the next few decades, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the (woefully underprepared) Pacific Northwest. People can’t stop talking about the piece this week. Vox provided numbers and graphics and timelines, while Seattle’s The Stranger picked out for its readers the five scariest bits (on that front, this paragraph seems hard to
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Whether just because he made such a fuss about being left off the last time, or because that fuss drew the attention of readers who then went out and bought his book, Ted Cruz has now made it on to the New York Times bestseller list. But Team Cruz wants more—a campaign spokesperson insists that the Times’s initial decision to keep A Time for Truth off the list (they’d essentially suggested that Cruz was bulk-buying it himself to rig sales) was “partisan” and “raises troubling questions that should concern any author. . . . The
Last night at a McNally Jackson event, a woman explained to the critic James Wood that the character of Atticus Finch had always read as false and creepy to her, and that his emergence as a racist in Go Set a Watchman just shows Harper Lee only ever rewrote him in heroic, sentimental mode for commercial reasons: She’s apparently not the only one for whom a racist Atticus hasn’t come as much of a shock. Meanwhile, someone has gone so far as to give the novel the track-changes treatment, and show you where the text overlaps with To Kill a
Charles Dickens Worms turn? This week the Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, and a few others have teamed up against the twenty-year-old bullies Amazon, telling on them to the Justice Department. Poor Harper Lee continues to be milked for all she’s worth: With spectacular timing, it now transpires that yet another novel may have turned up, perhaps one “bridging” the gap between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Less suspect, perhaps, is the discovery by an antiquarian book dealer of Charles Dickens’s annotations on a collection of the periodical he edited, All the Year Round,
Harper Lee An early review (and excerpt) of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which will be published tomorrow, has shocked Lee’s fans by revealing that the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, crusading lawyer Atticus Finch, is a racist in the new novel. Go Set a Watchman, which some are calling a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, tells the story of a grown-up Scout Finch (now known as Jean Louise) returning to Alabama to visit Atticus in the 1950s. We learn that Atticus has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, and he has some unkind things to
Since Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman comes out next week (and you can read the first chapter, or indeed have Reese Witherspoon read it to you, here), a reporter for Bloomberg Business headed to Monroeville to try to untangle the whole strange story of its provenance. Apparently some people are only just discovering the Awl. At the Verge, there’s an admiring profile of the site, and especially of its redheaded media/tech savants Matt Buchanan and John Herrman (formerly of Gizmodo and then Buzzfeed, they seem to come as a package deal). The Awl is presented as understanding the
Donald Trump For authors, few things ever seem to go in this direction. As of next year, the Man Booker International Prize is merging with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize to create one annual award for a translated work of literary fiction. When the Man Booker International was awarded every two years for a whole body of work, you had to be Lydia Davis or László Krasznahorkai to get your hands on the £60,000 (c. $90,000), but now you could get it for a single book—though, of course, you’d have to split it with your translator. Somebody really went
Thomas Piketty If you missed the translation of Die Zeit’s interview with Thomas Piketty, the economist and author of last year’s somewhat unlikely blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century, then it looks as if you really have missed it (for now, it has been taken down from Medium for copyright reasons). Piketty accuses Germany of hypocrisy in its current approach to Greece and its debts. Karl Ove Knausgaard gets the Vice treatment, explaining why he considers himself “repressed.” And Vice gets the Columbia Journalism Review treatment: A “multibillion-dollar enterprise that continues to be described as ‘swashbuckling’ and ‘edgy.’ That
Juan Felipe Herrera The Hulk Hogan v. Gawker lawsuit that was set to begin today in Florida has been postponed indefinitely because trial scheduling rules were not followed. Hogan is suing Gawker for one hundred millions dollars because the site posted a sex tape of the wrestling star in 2012; Gawker founder Nick Denton has said that his media company doesn’t have that kind of money. Denton thinks he will prevail in the lawsuit, though, and has defended the post as newsworthy: “We wrote a story which did not simply add another rumor to an already large pile of
Harper Lee As HarperCollins prepare to publish the most pre-ordered book in their history, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the plot thickens in terms of just when and how the lost-and-found novel came to light—it was apparently several years earlier than Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, had announced to readers, which further complicates the questions already surrounding the circumstances of its publication. Following Gawker’s lead, editorial workers at Salon have also decided to unionize. Meanwhile Gawker itself won a delay of several months in its trial with Hulk Hogan over his sex tape. As the hefty lawsuit continues to
Bill O’Reilly Publishers Weekly gently addresses Bill O’Reilly’s distress over their failure to include his book Killing Reagan in their latest “announcement issue,” which provides librarians and booksellers with a list of the upcoming season’s significant books. The political journalist Leslie Gelb has landed in trouble for apparently promising Hillary Clinton friendly coverage in advance—”He said he would give you a veto over content,” a fundraiser wrote to Clinton, “and looked me in the eye and said, ‘she will like it’”—and sending her the text of his 2009 piece to read before it came out. The new owners of
David Foster Wallace and Jason Segel ‘‘I think let’s start iterating,’’ Arianna Huffington says. ‘‘Let’s not wait for the perfect product.’’ At the New York Times magazine, a look inside how the Huffington Post is run: “It’s as though Huffington is spreading an illness while simultaneously peddling the cure. Call it hypocrisy, but it testifies to her savvy. The business of web media is figuring out what people want — and if what we want is contradictory, why shouldn’t Huffington profit from that contradiction?” A recent Gawker post called the place “essentially Soviet in its functioning. Purges and show
Ottessa Moshfegh “But why would Europe do this?” Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, weighs in on the situation in Greece, concluding: “I know how I would vote.” The Center for Fiction has announced its longlist for the 2015 First Novel Prize, and those in contention include Ottessa Moshfegh, Ben Metcalf, and Miranda July. It looks as if Rebekah Brooks, remarkably unscathed by the vast phone-hacking scandal that saw her face criminal charges, will soon make a comeback in Murdoch-land, perhaps as chief executive of News UK. The French film director Claire Denis, who set Beau Travail, her 1999 reimagining
Nelly Arcan The Huffington Post is aiming to increase its number of contributors from one hundred thousand to one million, using a new app, Donatello, and a self-publishing platform for writers. Arianna Huffington assures us cynics that there will be a system in place for “preserving the quality”: Would-be authors will have to be approved by editors (once) before they can start creating hard-hitting citizen journalism (for free, of course). Buzzfeed has an intriguing report on Sidney Blumenthal, adviser, “confidant,” and controversy magnet to Hillary Clinton. It discusses his friendship with Tina Brown and his somewhat shadowy influence on the
Ta-Nehisi Coates In light of events in Charleston, Random House has decided to move the publication date of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s forthcoming book on race, bringing it out in July rather than September. “We started to feel pregnant with this book,” the executive editor of the Spiegel Grau imprint said. “We had this book that so many people wanted.” They’d previously discussed publishing early during the protests following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, but the book had not been ready then. “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued
Roxane Gay Roxane Gay begins her regular opinion contributions to the New York Times with a powerful piece on the rhetoric of forgiveness for crimes such as Dylann Roof’s, and on her own unwillingness to forgive: “Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and
Claudia Rankine From the New York Times Magazine, a devastating essay by Claudia Rankine: “The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us.” So far the doxxing of Saudi Arabia doesn’t seem to have produced any major surprises, but at the Washington Post, Marc Lynch suggests that the materials published by Wikileaks and the Beirut paper al-Akhbar on Friday (the first batch, with many more to come) will matter more than you might
Jess Row At the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb points out that Dylann Roof’s alleged murder of six black women and three black men during a Bible-study class in Charleston last week “was nothing less than an act of terror.” David Remnick calls the merciful responses by relatives of the victims a “superhuman form of endurance and pity.” Jess Row’s novel Your Face in Mine, which came out last August, tells the story of a white man who has undergone “racial reassignment surgery” in order to become black. This character, Martin, “has diagnosed himself with what he calls Racial Identity Dysphoria