Cate Blanchett in the movie “Carol,” a forthcoming adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel In this week’s New York magazine, Jonathan Chait sounds the old alarm of “political correctness.” For Chait, trigger warnings and the idea of “mansplaining,” among other Internet-centric phenomena, amount to a grave hazard to free-speech and liberalism. The Internet, in other words, has given the p.c. cops more reach. “Political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression,” he argues. “Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims
Dean Baquet. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times. At Spiegel, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet says the paper largely “failed” readers in the post-9/11 years, explains why the paper declined to run cartoons of Muhammad during the Charlie Hebdo story, and argues that the next Edward Snowden should bring his story to the Times, since the paper has the “guts” to publish it. In the LARB, Roy Scranton writes about the “trauma hero myth” in war literature and in movies like American Sniper, which foreground the suffering of individual soldiers at the expense of the big picture:
Vivian Gornick The diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner charged with being a top level Al Qaeda recruiter, was just published (in heavily redacted form) after a seven-year legal fight. The Times recounts that one of the redacted passages is Slahi writing “I couldn’t help breaking in At the Paris Review, read an excerpt of Elaine Blair’s interview with Vivian Gornick, whose new memoir, The Old Woman and the City, is expected in May. Gornick’s independence and severity are in full display in the conversation. “My editor and my agent kept urging me to write more
Barrett Brown The Economist has hired Zanny Minton Beddoes as editor. Formerly the business affairs editor, she’s the first woman to be in charge at the magazine. The New Yorker rounds up its coverage of authors named as 2014 NBCC award finalists (announced Monday), including work by Blake Bailey, Roz Chast, and Elizabeth Kolbert; reviews of Claudia Rankine, Marilynne Robinson, and John Lahr; and criticism by Alexandra Schwartz. The NYPD is more closely monitoring the city’s media outlets in the wake of recent attacks in Paris. At Artforum, John Ashbery remembers the painter Jane Freilicher, who died last month
At n+1, Alicia Garza, one of the organizers (along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi) behind #blacklivesmatter, talks about how the hashtag was born and where the movement is heading. Garza recounts her reaction to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin: “A lot of what I was hearing and seeing on social media was that they were never going to charge somebody and convict somebody of killing a black child. My thing was: I’m not satisfied with that. I’m not satisfied with the ‘I told you so’ and I’m not satisfied with the nihilistic ‘it’ll never happen’
Steven Pinker Genius (formerly Rap Genius) has introduced a tool that will let people annotate anything on the internet. Add genius.com/ to the beginning of any URL and you’ll be able to access a version of the page on which you can correct, comment on, or interpret anything you please. The project is still in beta, so at the moment only a handful of people have permission to annotate, but anyone can view their annotations. The company recently brought on a number of new people, including music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, formerly of the New Yorker, and Emily Segal of K-Hole,
Philip K. Dick The New Yorker has posted a trailer for its new video series on Amazon, The New Yorker Presents, which will include a film by Jonathan Demme based on an article by contributor Rachel Aviv; Ariel Levy’s interview with artist Marina Abramovic; and a short based on a Simon Rich story, in which Alan Cumming stars as God. (The pilot Amazon’s other literary TV series The Man in the High Castle—directed by Ridley Scott and based on the Philip K. Dick novel—is now available, and receiving strong reviews.) Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen is currently on the New York Times
Natasha Vargas-Cooper A boy who claimed to have died, gone to heaven, and come back to life has said he lied. We ran a story on Colton Burpo, a kid who claims a similar story. Burpo hasn’t retracted his (yet?). Yesterday, the Brian Lehrer show staged a debate about Amazon between the attorney Scott Turow and the self-published author Joe Konrath. An informal poll asked listeners whether they think Amazon is good for readers, bad for readers, or whether the answer is “complicated.” Responses were split about equally among the choices. Natasha Vargas-Cooper (a frequent Bookforum contributor) is leaving The
Joan Didion in an ad for Celine French provocateur Dieudonné was arrested yesterday after he posted what authorities are calling a terrorist apologia on Facebook, “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.” At the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald digs into the hypocrisy he sees in the free-speech tributes in France, concluding, ”This week’s celebration of France—and the gaggle of tyrannical leaders who joined it—had little to do with free speech and much to do with suppressing ideas they dislike while venerating ideas they prefer.” Jonathan Franzen will be appearing on May 27th at BEA to get
Ed Park The American Dialect Society, an organization of linguists, academics, and other word lovers, has named \#blacklivesmatter its “Word of the Year.” It is the first time in the society’s 125 year history that a hashtag has won the award (though the word hashtag was the 2012 winner). Language aficionado Ben Zimmer, who chairs the society’s committee on new words, said of their choice: ”While \#blacklivesmatter may not fit the traditional definition of a word, it demonstrates how powerfully a hashtag can convey a succinct social message. . . . Language scholars are paying attention to the innovative
Sasha Frere-Jones Sasha Frere-Jones has quit his job as the New Yorker’s pop music critic and is heading to Genius.com; his last New Yorker column is a piece about Northwest rock heroines Sleater-Kinney. Foster Kamer considers Frere-Jones’s move, writing that it really isn’t all that surprising, while at Gawker, Leah Finnegan pleads with trailblazing start-ups to stop giving Old Guard journalists so much money. Charlie Hebdo’s new issue will have a cartoon of a crying Prophet Muhammad on the cover. The Nation has |http://www.thenation.com/blog/194585/nation-magazine-names-david-hajdu-music-critic#|hired David Hajdu to be its music critic|. Hajdu’s books include Lush Life: A Biography of
Robert Stone Novelist Robert Stone died on Saturday. He was the author of numerous novels, including the National Book Award-winning Dog Soldiers, which updated Graham Greene’s international thrillers for the Vietnam War era and paved the way for Denis Johnson’s counterculture classic Already Dead. Michel Houellebecq—the subject of a Charlie Hebdo cover story titled “The predictions of the Great Houellebecq,” published on the day that terrorists killed twelve people at the satirical newspaper—has stopped promoting his novelSubmission. The novel, which was released on Wednesday, is about a radical Muslim politician who is elected president in 2022 France. On Friday,
Claudia Rankine The Charlie Hebdo staff members who survived Wednesday’s attack will publish an issue of the paper next week. They are planning to increase its print run from around sixty thousand to one million copies, with donations helping to defray the costs. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—which concerns, among other things, racism and police brutality—was published in October 2014, but subsequent printings of the book, a finalist for the National Book Award, have already included changes that reflect the deaths of new victims, including Michael Brown and Eric Garner. David Haglund, who edits Slate’s Brow Beat blog, has been named the new literary
Stéphane Charbonnier How publications are responding to the attack on Charlie Hebdo: from solidarity to censorship. And, at the Times, a profile of Stéphane Charbonnier (aka Charb), the paper’s editorial director, one of twelve people killed in the attack. The New Republic has announced the first new hires since the magazine’s disastrous editorial reboot this fall, which culminated with many prominent staff members leaving. Charged with righting the ship are two new senior editors, Jamil Smith and Elspeth Reeve; an associate editor, Bijan Stephen; and a poetry editor, Cathy Park Hong. TNR’s editor, Gabriel Snyder, promises more “exciting updates” in
Nicholas and Cathy Sparks Nicholas Sparks and his wife, Cathy, have declared everything Sparks ever wrote null and void by divorcing, and Twitter has consequently lost hope in the power of love. The National Book Critics Circle has elected its board for the coming year, and among the eight is our own Michael Miller. There’s been a lot of hiring and firing lately. Amy O’Leary, formerly the Times’ digital deputy editor for the international desk, is moving to Upworthy to act as editorial director. (The Observer wonders if the hire signals “a more serious direction” for the company.) Lois
James Risen Leon Wieseltier, formerly of the New Republic, has joined the staff of The Atlantic. Wieseltier was one of the first to announce his departure from TNR amid the general exodus in early December. The editor in chief of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ralph Eubanks, will leave when his contract expires at the end of the summer. Forbes has announced its list of “30 under 30” in media. It includes Questlove; Peter Thiel, of Paypal and Palantir; Lauren Bush; Monica Lewinsky; and Tinder’s Sean Rad. On the NYRB blog, Geoffrey O’Brien writes about Inherent Vice. “If everything is
Ben Lerner Mark Zuckerberberg is starting what could become the biggest book club in history. The Facebook founder has written that his “challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week—with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.” This will not be a solitary endeavor: Zuckerberg has created a Facebook page called A Year of Books, where he will name the books he’s reading, and invite others to discuss the titles. There are some basic rules for those who join the club: “We ask that everyone who participates read the books and we
Patton Oswalt Since this past summer, the London Review of Books has been serially publishing Jenny Diski’s memoirs.London Review of BooksIn this installment, Diski describes listening, as a teenager, to Doris Lessing (Diski’s guardian) and her friends: “To start with, I couldn’t understand how it was so easy for them to have a point of view, to know how and why things ‘worked’. ‘Working’, the pivotal valuation, was never defined. There seemed to be too much to learn. I picked up quickly that having opinions wasn’t enough and that it was necessary to have a basis – from reading, from