The Rumpus talks to Danzy Senna about 1990s Brooklyn, Jonestown, and why she gave up on another novel in favor of writing her latest book, New People. “There was something in it that wasn’t moving forward. I think I couldn’t quite find the story. Sometimes a character’s problem starts to bleed into the novel itself, the writing, and my character in the other novel didn’t want anything,” she said. “I also, on a practical level, had two children and they were young, demanding, and more interesting to me than my novel at the time.”

At Mother Jones, Shane Bauer explains what journalists got wrong

Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times has been dismissed. Palin had sued the paper over an editorial that linked the 2011 shooting at a Tucson rally for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to an image from Palin’s PAC that showed crosshairs over certain congressional districts. No link between the shooter and the map had been proven, and the Times corrected the article. "Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States," Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in his dismissal. "In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be made, some of which will be

Paul Farhi explores press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s tendency to deflect questions with a promise to “get back to” reporters with an answer later—and her habit of breaking that promise. In one briefing last week, Sanders’s used the deflection ten times, on issues ranging from the ban on transgender soldiers to “the White House’s reaction to federal approval of Amazon.com’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market.” Farhi asked Sanders directly about her rate of reply, to which she responded that she gets back to reporters whenever possible. “Asked in a subsequent email if she avoids inconvenient

Hilary Mantel explains why, two decades after her death, people are still talking about Princess Diana “as if she had just left the room.” “Royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see,” she writes. “They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her.”

Rebecca Solnit talks to The Guardian about Trump, modern families, and her latest

Claire Messud remembers the fiction of her mother’s library, and how it formed her literary life. “For a long time I believed that the books I read were more or less universally known,” she writes. “It didn’t occur to me that by borrowing and devouring books selected by my mother, I was being shaped by her predilections, thoughts and desires.”

The Stranger’s Rich Smith looks into the controversy behind PEN Literary Award nominee John Smelcer, who Marlon James recently referred to as a “living con job” due to his falsified credentials and questionable claims of Native American heritage.

At

Variety reports that the recent firing of four top Los Angeles Times editors “was the result of a month of newsroom turmoil.” Paul Pringle, an investigative reporter at the paper, had filed a human resources complaint about the delay of a story about USC, which Pringle alleged was “due to cozy relations between the editors and USC officials.” Although an investigation didn’t prove Pringle’s claims, the incident prompted “additional newsroom grievances against the paper’s leadership.” Nieman Lab reflects on former editor Davan Maharaj’s time at the paper, “a remarkable run as a tightrope walker

The Village Voice will discontinue its weekly print edition. "The most powerful thing about the Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week," owner Peter Barbey said in a statement. "It was that the Village Voice was alive, and that it changed in step with and reflected the times and the ever-evolving world around it. I want the Village Voice brand to represent that for a new generation of people—and for generations to come.”

Publishing platform Medium has finally explained its new system for paying writers. The $5-per-month reader memberships will be doled

Beyonce is working on a 600-page book about the making of Lemonade. How to Make Lemonade “shows the inspiration and themes behind some of the film’s most provocative and cryptic moments,” and includes a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson. The limited-edition version of the book includes two LPs, and is available on Beyonce’s website for $300.

Adweek lists the online publishers who have chosen to “pivot to video” in the last few months. “Check in later to see what, exactly, they have headed toward.”

Publisher’s Weekly visits the offices of the New York Times’s book review, which was recently

nothing about our days today is subtle, and the challenge of making science fiction not seem like a bald ripoff of current headlines is much more of a task than it’s been in a while.”

In a letter to his unborn child, novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard dwells on what “makes life worth living.” A partial list: apples, plastic bags, loneliness, and pissing.

At Playboy, novelist and critic Tom Carson weighs in on Tina Fey’s cake-eating SNL skit. “We’ll never know how anyone could watch her stuffing her face until her lips were covered in goo as she tried to spit out anti-Trump, anti-Nazi venom while

Novelist Michael Chabon has written “an open letter to our fellow Jews,” stating that, although some Jews have not opposed President Trump because he seems to be a friend to Israel, it is no longer acceptable, or even safe, to remain quiet. “Now he’s coming after you,” Chabon notes. “The question is: what are you going to do about it?”

“On the floor by my bed there are heaps of books I want to read, books I have to read and books I believe I need to read. So we are talking about id, ego and superego books.” Karl Ove Knausgaard talks to the New York Times about what he’s reading.

T magazine

Isaac Fitzgerald is leaving his post at Buzzfeed Books to start a new “morning show” with poet and Buzzfeed culture editor Saeed Jones. The show, called AM to DM, is part of Buzzfeed, and will be livestreamed through Twitter daily from 8-9am. It begins on September 25, and is, according to Fitzgerald, “a one-of-a-kind morning show … connecting an up-to-date audience with stories happening now, right from inside the news cycle.”

Jonathan Chait—the author of Audacity, a book about the Obama administration—has written an article that shows how Trump’s aides have tried to conceal the president’s

At New York magazine, Boris Kachka reports on what led the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani to take a buyout last month, and the book that Kakutani is working on now. Sources say that Kakutani felt at odds with the new direction of the book review under Pamela Paul. “Lone wolves hurling thunderbolts from their garrets gave way to affable co-critics doing online chats . . . writing personal essays and exploring their own biases,” Kachka writes. “For a very long time, Michi got her way,” one anonymous source said, “until very recently people started pushing back in a big way, and I think that