After the killings in Charleston this week, Ta-Nehisi Coates says the Confederate flag must at long last be taken down: “Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol.”

Roger Ailes Could 2016 mark the end of Fox News as we know it? Its chairman, Roger Ailes, a man so powerful, as Gabriel Sherman puts it, “that he has been able to run a right-wing political operation under the auspices of a news channel,” appears to be struggling. At the Daily Intelligencer, Sherman gives an intriguing account of Ailes’s troubled relationship with James Murdoch, who is about to take over from his father as CEO of Fox (in private, Ailes has apparently referred to James as a “fucking dope” and “Fredo”). The failure of Ailes’s public attempt to

Tom Harper on CNN In the Dominican Republic, after today’s deadline to register with government authorities, hundreds of thousands of workers, mostly of Haitian origin, will face deportation; Harper’s has just removed the paywall from Rachel Nolan’s frightening and essential account of the context, which appeared in its May 2015 issue. It’s worth watching this weekend’s bizarre appearance on CNN by Tom Harper of the Sunday Times (UK), which had just published an evidence-free lead story titled “British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.” Even the most basic questions about the story were met with “don’t know”s. “That’s not

James Fenton Rachel Dolezal, an NAACP leader who has been accused of posing as African-American, stepped down yesterday, and will today give several TV interviews. In the New York Times magazine, a historian explores earlier examples of such “reverse passing;” and on his blog, Lenin’s Tomb, Richard Seymour asks “the interesting question”: “Why is race so resilient despite being so malleable, and despite having no fundamental reality outside of power?” The poet James Fenton has won this year’s PEN Pinter Prize, set up in memory of Harold Pinter in 2009. The judges included the playwright’s widow, Antonia Fraser, who

Alina Simone Gawker Media is preparing for its legal battle with Hulk Hogan, who is asking that the media company give him $100 million for posting a sex-tape featuring the legendary wrestler. The trial begins on July 6 in Florida, and pivots on Gawker’s argument that the tape was “newsworthy.” Most legal experts expect Gawker to win, but the fact that the trial is taking place in Hogan’s hometown could affect the results. As Fortune points out: “The case is important not only because Hogan wants $100 million, which could ruin Gawker, but also because it highlights how Gawker

Joyce Carol Oates The Huffington Post has dug up Jeb Bush’s 1995 book Profiles in Character, and quotes extensively from a chapter titled “The Restoration of Shame.” There, the former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate argued that “public humiliations” might help deter women from having children “out of wedlock.” In the course of his argument, Bush cites an American literary classic: “Infamous shotgun weddings and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter are reminders that public condemnation of irresponsible sexual behavior has strong historical roots.” In response to author Kamila Shamsie’s article about gender bias in the publishing industry, the independent

Juan Felipe Herrera Juan Felipe Herrera, a Mexican-American who was raised by migrant farm workers, has been named the new United States Poet Laureate. Herrera’s work includes Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border, and the Library of Congress points out that his poetry, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, captures “our larger American identity.” “You have to wing it. If you don’t then it seems like it’s written from an outline. And the idea is to start to set yourself some impossible kind of place to get to, and it becomes an

Nisid Hajari At The Guardian, Sophie Elmhirst profiles author and biologist Richard Dawkins, who is on a “global quest to broadcast the wonder of science and the nonexistence of God.” The article presents Dawkins—whose books include The God Delusion and An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist—as a seemingly tireless and increasingly divisive scholar. “For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage.” Rebecca Traister (the author

Wednesday Martin Alexis Madrigal writes about a new book titled Iterating Grace, a satire of tech startup culture that has been circulating around San Francisco. The question is: who wrote it? “No one knows who wrote the story or created the book,” Madrigal writes. “No one knows what the person who did it all wants. Most people I know who’ve received the book, who are all either journalists or authors, think it is some sort of dark-arts marketing scheme. They think Microsoft or Google or some startup is behind this whole production, and that the commercial purpose of this

Ha Jin The stage adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home won the Tony for Best Musical. In response to Book Expo America’s spotlight on China, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Francine Prose, Murong Xuecun, and A.M. Homes staged a protest on the steps of the New York Public Library, reading works by Chinese authors who had been imprisoned and censored, and holding pictures of artist Ai Weiwei and the Tibetan writer Woeser. At the New Yorker, Christopher Beam reports on the dissent, and reaffirms what many noticed when walking by the large, front-and-center China section at BEA: that

Ali Smith. Photo by Tim Duncan. In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that Gawker’s editorial employees have voted to unionize—joining the Writers Guild of America, East—a Politico staffer has asked his colleagues to redouble their efforts to unionize as well. As Erik Wemple pointed out on his blog earlier this year, it may be a tough sell. Ali Smith has been awarded the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel How to Be Both. At Vanity Fair, a profile of power couple Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge includes new details about the mass exodus at the New Republic

James Hannaham The in-progress takeover of AOL by Verizon has left the future of the Huffington Post in doubt. AOL is HuffPo’s parent company, and while Arianna Huffington has unveiled ambitious plans for the site’s future, she is currently between contracts and, according to New York Times sources, isn’t sure if her plans can be realized under the Verizon banner. As an anonymous Huffpo staffer writes at Gawker, words like demoralized are now frequently used to describe the mood in Arianna-land, but, really, it has always been that way: “To anyone who has worked at the site for any

Maggie Nelson here.) In a blog post titled “Up the Amazon with the BS Machine,” Ursula K. Le Guin continues to request that readers stop buying books from the online superstore. Harper Lee’s forthcoming Go Set a Watchman has become “the most pre-ordered book” in its publisher HarperCollins’s history. At Bookforum.com, Sarah Nicole Prickett interviews Maggie Nelson about her new book, The Argonauts (which also features prominently in our summer issue’s cover story): “As with all my books, I worried about having to identify with this one too much, the same way that when I was writing about cruelty,

Jennifer Cody Epstein Novelist Jennifer Cody Epstein says she regrets signing the recent letter condemning PEN’s award in honor of Charlie Hebdo magazine. Two students at Northwestern University recently filed Title IX complaints against Laura Kipnis, after the author published an article about “sexual paranoia” on university campuses. This weekend, Kipnis was “cleared of wrongdoing” by a law firm that found that the ”preponderance of evidence does not support the complaint allegations.” EL James has announced that she’s writing a sequel to FiftyShades of Grey. The Atlantic has posted an article suggesting that Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life

Stacy Schiff According to Publishers Weekly, the 2015 Book Expo America, which wrapped up this weekend in New York, was “lively.” The “most talked about books” were, the magazine reports, Jonathan Franzen’s Purity and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire (Stacy Schiff’s The Witches was also in the spotlight). China did, as PW points out, feature prominently in this year’s BEA, occupying a large area front and center as attendees entered the convention center. But the area seemed, for the most part, free of traffic. PEN America, for one, questioned the focus on China, issuing a report titled “Censorship

AS AN INSTITUTION, the family is in the curious position of being regarded as both crucial to human survival and inimical to human freedom. It bears a note of bondage down to its root; family, that wonderfully warm, nourishing-sounding word (it’s the echo of mammal, mammary, mama, I suspect), derives from the Latin familia, a group of servants, the human property of a given household, from famulus, slave. Since its beginnings, family has carried this strain of being bonded—and not just in body but in imagination. “In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God,” says Ishmael, setting

Sasha Frere-Jones One of new media’s bigger coups over old seems not to be lasting: Gawker notes that only a few months after abandoning the New Yorker for the start-up Genius, music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is already backing away from his full-time commitment to “the annotation website that sticks bad jokes next to your favorite rap lyrics.” First Look Media offers us its code—if you wanted help redacting documents or getting around gag orders, look no further. Gawker writers discuss which way they’ll vote on unionizing as part of Writers Guild of America, in the comments section (“We like

Jenny Erpenbeck Jenny Erpenbeck and her translator Susan Bernofsky have won the £10,000 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days, which looks at the twentieth century through one woman’s several possible fates. Erpenbeck is the first living German writer to receive the prize (W.G. Sebald got it posthumously for Austerlitz, as did Gert Hofmann for The Film Explainer). Chelsea Manning has a piece in the Guardian marking five years since she was first locked up for releasing the Iraq and Afghanistan “war diaries.” Gawker writers will hold a June 3 vote on whether to unionize. CEO Nick

Philip Larkin The Times Literary Supplement drew gleeful scorn online after publishing, with extended and enthusiastic commentary, a lost Philip Larkin poem that, in fact, wasn’t one (it’s by Frank Redpath, one of Hull’s less famous poets, and appeared in a 1982 anthology). No more free e-books? Publishers have won a High Court ruling in London that will force British internet service providers to block access to seven pirate e-book sites, including LibGen and AvaxHome. First they came for the mp3s… The land of digital media start-ups is a large and frightening one nowadays: Vox just bought the 18-month-old

Clarice Lispector Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who was the paper’s Tehran bureau chief, was arrested on espionage charges last July. His, trial, which starts today, is closed to the public, and to his family. The Post sought a visa to send an editor to attend the trial, but the request was ignored. In a statement released just before the trial started, executive editor Martin Baron stated: “ The latest issue of Harper’s includes Clarice Lispector’s final story, left unfinished at the time of her death. As Rachel Kushner wrote in the pages of Bookforum: Lispector “had a diamond-hard