Adam Thirlwell In honor of its 150th anniversary, The Nation, which published its first issue on July 1, 1865, is publishing a celebratory issue that features articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn, among others, and is available as a free PDF download. Prospect magazine asked its readers to name their favorite “world thinkers,” and Thomas Picetty, the French economist and the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is at the top of the list. Charlie Hebdo has won PEN America’s Freedom of Expression Courage Award. The New York Times’s T Magazine blog offers a
Pamela Paul After receiving numerous letters asking him to “host third-party content” at theatlantic.com, James Fallows pretended to be interested, and found out what some sponsored-content generators hope to accomplish. “I am looking at getting a article placed on your site by my team of creative writers regarding some of the latest industry news around Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, has signed a book deal with Henry Holt and Company. The memoir, titled My Life with Bob, is a record of and meditation on books the author has read, and it is scheduled to
Cesar Aira Apple executives, who are not known to voice strong opinions on anything that isn’t bezel-related, say they much prefer the new unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs to Walter Isaacson’s authorized (and unflinching) 2011 book, Steve Jobs. Now that senator Ted Cruz is officially a candidate for president, how should mainstream journalists handle his assertion that climate-change science is phony? At the journalism blog Press Think, NYU professor Jay Rosen considers the four ways that publications can handle the climate-change deniers’ position and how they might balance impartiality with the idea that facts matter. We were surprised to
Norman Rush The Guardian has appointed Katharine Vinerto be its new editor in chief. Viner, who will be the first woman EIC in the paper’s 194-year history, is currently the magazine’s deputy editor, and will begin her new position this summer. In a column for USA Today, Michael Wolff suggests that the choice of Viner instead of another editor, Janine Gibson, was in some ways influenced by Gibson’s role in the Guardian’s coverage of Edward Snowden—stories that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize but also caused turmoil in the organization as a whole. (Here’s a speech Viner gave in
The New York Times has dropped one of the new online opinion writers it just hired, Razib Khan. The paper announced its new hires on Wednesday; shortly afterward, Gawker described Khan as having been associated with “racist, far-right online publications” such as Taki’s Magazine, which, according to J.K..Trotter, was founded by a “flamboyantly racist Greek journalist.” Khan’s contract was terminated on Thursday.
Kenneth Goldsmith Last Friday, the poet Kenneth Goldsmith—known for what he calls “uncreative writing”—read Michael Brown’s autopsy report, altered “for poetic effect,” at Brown University. Goldsmith has since been widely criticized for, among other things, appropriating a text that he had no rights to and being tacky. Goldsmith’s self-defense amounted to the suggestion that he’s been doing this sort of appropriation for a very long time; among his books of poetry, for example, is Seven American Deaths and Disasters, a transcription of quotes from reports of national tragedies, including the shooting of JFK. Goldsmith retweeted many of the criticisms
Susan Berman The remains of Miguel de Cervantes have been found in a convent. Christian Lorentzen will be the next book critic at New York magazine, replacing Kathryn Schulz, who left a few months ago for the New Yorker. Lorentzen writes frequently for Bookforum; his most recent piece for us was on Kazuo Ishiguro. The most well-known book by the writer Susan Berman, one of the alleged victims of Robert Durst, is Easy Street, a memoir of her family’s mob ties. With the success of the HBO show Jinx, a six-episode HBO documentary about Durst, paperback copies of Berman’s book
Rita Dove John Cook, Gawker Media’s executive editor for investigations, says that his company will be filing a suit against the State Department, based on a Freedom of Information Act request that has gone unheeded. In 2012, the website requested emails sent between Hillary Clinton spokesperson Philippe Reines and thirty-four news organizations. So far, Gawker has received nothing. Meanwhile, the Associated Press is suing the State Department for another ignored FoIA request. Roberto Bolano’s 2666 is being adapted for the stage. The National Book Critics Circle, which announced the winners of its 2014 awards on Thursday, has posted a
Andrew Solomon The FCC has published, in a three-hundred-plus-page document, its new net neutrality rules, which reclassify the provision of high-speed internet as a telecommunications rather than an information service. The rules mean that the agency will be taking a more active role in regulation, something that broadband providers such as Verizon are likely to try to combat. “Every stage of life longs for others,” Andrew Solomon said to his audience at this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. “When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.” Buzzfeed
Claude Sitton Laura Kipnis has provoked the ire of students at Northwestern, where she teaches, with a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article criticizing policies that prohibit relations between students and professors. “I suppose I’m out of step with the new realities because I came of age in a different time,” Kipnis wrote, “under a different version of feminism, minus the layers of prohibition and sexual terror surrounding the unequal-power dilemmas of today.” In protest, about thirty students walked the campus carrying mattresses and pillows, and circulated a petition calling for a “swift, concrete and direct response from the
Jimmy Wales Finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award include Jenny Offill, for Dept. of Speculation; Emily St. John Mandel, for Station Eleven; Atticus Lish, for Preparation for the Next Life; Jennifer Clement, for Prayers for the Stolen; and Jeffery Renard Allen, for Song of the Shank. The winner will be announced April 7. In other awards news, the longlist for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which has been awarded for twenty years, was just released. According to the chair of this year’s judges, Shami Chakrabarti, literary accomplishment by women still goes under-recognized: We’re still “still nowhere near where we should
Laura Albert At the Page-Turner blog, Jelani Cobb contemplates the Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department. “The release of the report, just days before the first black President attended the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, in Selma, made this week feel whipsawed by progress and stagnation.” In 2006, novelist Stephen Beachy revealed in New York magazine that teen-hustler-turned-novelist JT Leroy—whose fans and supporters included Lou Reed, Mary Gaitskill, and Michael Chabon—was in fact a woman named Laura Albert. Following a flurry of discussions about the fraud, interest in Leroy’s work dwindled. But two
Jerry Saltz In response to complaints, Facebook has suspended New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz. Saltz has 55,000 followers (on Twitter and Instagram, he has more than 150,000) and frequently publishes what you might call “provocative” pictures and posts to his feed. One of the more recent pieces that he wrote that gained him a lot of attention was an article complaining about the conservatism of the art world, illustrated by images of penises, martyrdom, and defecation. He wrote, in response to Facebook’s move: “To all the purity police who complained that my medieval and ancient pics were
Emily Gould and Ruth Curry Coffee House Press is launching an imprint with Emily Books, the hybrid e-book publishing project started by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry. In the spring of 2016, the Minneapolis-based publisher will begin publishing two Emily Books titles a year, for which Gould and Curry will do the acquisitions and editing. The focus of the list will be on “transgressive writers of the past, present and future, with an emphasis on the writing of women, trans and queer people, writing that blurs genre distinctions and is funny, challenging and provocative.” The Baffler, which is in the
In the Paris Review’s interview with Elena Ferrante—the first-ever interview with the writer in person—Ferrante describes the crisis of confidence she experienced while working on The Days of Abandonment: “The hand was the same, the writing was the same, there was the same choice of vocabulary, same syntax, same punctuation, and yet the tone had become false. For months I felt that the preceding pages were beyond my abilities, and now I no longer felt equal to my own work. It made me bitter. You’d rather lose yourself than find yourself, I thought. Then everything started up again. But even
Marina Abramovic At the New Republic, Jamil Smith discusses the New York Times’s coverage of race, specifically its reassignment of Tanzina Vega from the race beat, which she had suggested herself, to the metropolitan section, and the more general tendency of papers across the country to shutter their race beats. Smith quotes Cord Jefferson, who wrote a piece for Matter last summer in which he described his exhaustion writing stories exclusively to do with race. Don’t “assign The performance artist Marina Abramovic will publish a memoir next year, to coincide with her seventieth birthday. At the Columbia Journalism Review,
Bruce Wagner When the New York Post reported Jill Abramson’s new book deal with Simon and Schuster last week, it noted that some at the New York Times might be “nervous” about the book (Abramson was “abruptly dismissed” from her position as the paper’s executive editor last year). The Times has now run a story about the book deal. The story is fairly straightforward, but it does conclude with some skepticism about how much Abramson was actually paid for the book. After interviewing Alice Mayhew, who will edit it, the Times reports: “Ms. Mayhew declined to disclose what the publisher
Marie Kondo One of Kim Gordon’s favorite novelists is Mary Gaitskill. (Ours too.) Tonight, at the Met, a “poetry parade” cosponsored by the Artist’s Institute. Reading aloud texts that respond to artworks in the museum will be Eileen Myles, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and others. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in the gallery of Egyptian art and concludes at 8:00 in the exhibition Madame Cézanne. Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson has sold her book to Simon Schuster for a sum believed to be around $1 million. ““I’ve been a front-line combatant in the news media’s battles to