• April Ryan
    August 15, 2017

    Ryan Kelly on photographing Charlottesville attack; April Ryan on being called an "enemy" of Trump

    GoDaddy is cancelling the Daily Stormer’s hosting service after the website posted a hate-filled article about Heather Heyer, who was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville last weekend. At Columbia Journalism Review, photographer Ryan Kelly recounts capturing the moment that James Alex Fields Jr rammed his car into a crowd of protesters. Kelly was covering the protest on his last day as a photojournalist for The Daily Progress. “It was a terrible thing and the fact that more people will be more aware of it happening is an overall positive,” he writes, “but I can’t say I’m happy to

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  • August 14, 2017

    The growing backlash against one PEN Awards finalist

    The Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation has created a list of books and articles to help “educate readers about the Penguin Random House has given us a sneak peak of the cover of Melissa Broder’s novel The Pisces, due out from the Hogarth imprint in May 2018.

    In an interview at the Creative Independent, Matthew Zapruder—a poet, editor (he edits the poetry page of the NYT Magazine), and critic—confronts an assumption that he believes steers readers away from poetry: “People think poetry is hard and their idea about what’s hard about it is wrong. They think it’s hard because you have to

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  • Zinzi Clemmons. Photo: Nina Subin
    August 11, 2017

    Zinzi Clemmons on belonging; Jeffrey Lord fired by CNN

    At the New York Times Magazine, Ruth Franklin profiles novelist Claire Messud. Although Messud’s works have been well-received by critics, they have not always been commercial successes. But Messud says that she has no interest in trying to make her work more attractive to a wider readership. ‘‘There are bell bottoms and miniskirts, and there are pencil skirts and stiletto heels,’’ she said. ‘‘You can write something that’s a perfect work of art, but if it’s a pencil skirt that falls in a miniskirt moment, God help you. You just have to make your pencil skirt and be you.’’

    Zinzi Clemmons talks

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  • Molly Patterson. Photo: Elaine Sheng
    August 10, 2017

    Bruce Springsteen comes to Broadway; Molly Patterson on the low expectations of women

    Bruce Springsteen will perform on Broadway this fall, in a show that incorporates his music, excerpts from his autobiography, and other pieces of his writing. “Springsteen on Broadway” will run for eight weeks at the Walter Kerr Theater. “My show is just me, the guitar, the piano and the words and music,” Springsteen said. “Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work.”

    Director Ava DuVernay is adapting Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn for television.

    Actress Busy Philipps is writing an autobiographical essay collection. The still-untitled book

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  • Reggie Ugwu
    August 09, 2017

    Reggie Ugwu named pop culture reporter at the "Times"; Jonathan Dee on representing tragedy

    Vox analyzed seventeen months of Fox & Friends transcripts in an effort to understand the relationship between the show and the president. Rather than simply echoing the party line as traditional state-run media might, Alvin Chang writes that the show seeks to offer Trump advice. “What we found is that Fox & Friends has a symbiotic relationship with Trump that is far weirder and more interesting than state media,” Chang writes. “Instead of talking for Trump, they are talking to him.”

    The New York Times has hired Reggie Ugwu as a pop culture reporter. Ugwu was most recently at BuzzFeed News,

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  • Mary Beard
    August 08, 2017

    WNYC picks up Preet Bharara's podcast; Mary Beard on social media aggression

    The New York Times reports on the growing trend of investing in politically-minded memes, instead of spending money on traditional marketing tools like TV and newspaper ads. “Viral media expertise is emerging as a crucial skill for political operatives, and as donors look to replicate the success of the social media sloganeers who helped lift President Trump to victory, they’re seeking out talented meme makers.”

    WNYC has picked up former US Attorney Preet Bharara’s podcast. “Stay Tuned with Preet” will be a weekly show that focuses “on issues of justice and fairness.”

    The Globe and Mail

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  • Benjamin Moser
    August 07, 2017

    Why Norman Podhoretz rejected Benjamin Moser's preface

    More than a year ago, New York Review Classics announced that it would reissue Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 book Making It, with an introduction by critic and Susan Sontag biographer Benjamin Moser. When the new edition of Making It was published, however, it arrived with an introduction by Terry Teachout. Now, Moser explains why. Podhoretz is notorious for his shift from the radical left to the reactionary right, and in his introduction, Moser tried to show that even though he was interested in Making It, this did not amount to an endorsement of Podhoretz’s current political positions. “Podhoretz

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  • Margot Lee Sheerly. photo: Aran Shetterly
    August 04, 2017

    Jenny Zhang on language in "Sour Heart"; National Book Festival lineup announced

    Literary Hub talks to Jenny Zhang about childhood, representing the immigrant experience in fiction, and her new book, Sour Heart. While Zhang was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, her classmates often said that the language of her stories’ Chinese-American subjects wasn’t believable to them. “I always found that so befuddling,” she said. “How am I, a Chinese person, less knowledgeable about how Chinese people talk than you, a non-Chinese person? Then I realize what they’re really saying is ‘I’ve never met a Chinese person who speaks this way’ and there’s a lot of reasons for that they’re

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  • August 03, 2017

    Remembering Judith Jones; Sarah Schulman on Trump's victimhood

    Editor and author Judith Jones died yesterday at 93. The New York Times writes that Jones—who pulled the manuscript for the diary of Anne Frank out of a reject pile and published Mastering the Art of French Cooking after it had been passed over by other publishers—“modestly ascribed her success to being in the right place at the right time.”

    Flatiron has bought former FBI director James Comey’s book, but instead of “the tell-all memoir many readers hoped for,” Entertainment Weekly writes that the book will be about leadership. The Wall Street Journalreports that the book sold for $2.5 million

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  • Sam Shepard. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe
    August 02, 2017

    Patti Smith remembers Sam Shepard; Why we read dystopian fiction

    Patti Smith remembers friend and collaborator Sam Shepard, who died last week from complications of ALS. “He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west,” she writes. “He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.”

    At New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen reflects on the current demand for dystopian fiction. From Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, to Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, Lorentzen explains how “the present moment, with its dismal politics and cries from

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  • Gwendolyn Brooks
    August 01, 2017

    Claudia Rankine on the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks; Why MTV abandoned longform

    Mic examines MSNBC’s thwarted evolution into a centrist news channel. Chairman Andrew Lack had been planning to reorganize the network and increase its ratings by cancelling opinion-based programming in favor of more balanced news coverage. “But the election of Donald Trump has complicated that evolution,” Kelsey Sutton writes, “raising the profile and popularity of MSNBC’s liberal hosts just as Lack sought to dial back the network’s liberal identity.”

    Although the White House claims that Anthony Scaramucci’s departure was meant to give the new chief of staff a “clean slate,” that may be an

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  • Choire Sicha
    July 31, 2017

    Choire Sicha to edit the "New York Times" Style section

    Choire Sicha—the onetime Gawker writer, cofounder and former editor of the Awl, and the author of Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. 2009 A.D.) in a Large City—has been named the new editor of the New York Times’s Style section.

    Alexandra Schwartz considers the career and legacy of Times book critic Michiko Kakutani: “A good review brought on elation,” Schwartz writes. “A bad one incited rage, sometimes despair. Nicholson Baker compared getting a negative Kakutani review to undergoing surgery without anesthesia; Jonathan Franzen called her ‘the stupidest person in

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