Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2013, has signed a book deal with Bloomsbury to write his autobiography. Last Testament, to be co-written with German journalist Peter Seewald, will be released internationally in November. The book describes his childhood during the Third Reich, charts his rise to the papacy, and, the press materials suggest, grapples with his shortcomings at the Vatican: “His account deals with the controversies that rocked the Catholic world—how he enraged the Muslim world with his Regensburg speech, what he did and did not do to stamp out the clerical sexual abuse of

Washington Post reporter Jose A. DelReal was denied entry to a Mike Pence rally in Wisconsin, even after he had stored his cellphone and laptop in his car at the request of security. Erik Wemple has a round-up of the many troubling aspects of Trump’s adversarial relationship with the press. Observer writer Lincoln Mitchell is the latest employee to resign from the newspaper owned by Trump’s son-in-law. Trump held an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit Wednesday night which did not actually allow anyone to ask him “anything.” The AMA was held in a pro-Trump subreddit and moderated by the candidate’s

James Alan McPherson—the author, longtime teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a MacArthur Fellow—has died at age seventy-two. In 1978, McPherson became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his story collection Elbow Room, and in 2000, John Updike selected one of his stories for the anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century. 

Since Google shut down Dennis Cooper’s blog on June 27, the question has been: Why? We may soon find out: On Facebook, the novelist says that Google has finally made contact, and that the company’s lawyers are now ready

The Man Booker Prize longlist was announced this morning. The list includes Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, David Means’s Hystopia, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, and ten other novels. The winner will be announced on October 25th.

Michelle Goldberg, the author of The Means of Production: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, traces the way irrational animosity towards Hillary Clinton has changed over the past two decades. In 1996, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote: “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the élite and the lumpen.” Back then, Goldberg writes,

Vulture has a behind-the-scenes look at Transparent creator Jill Soloway’s new Amazon series, I Love Dick, which premieres on August 19th. Soloway has taken Chris Kraus's 1997 cult novel and transported it to Marfa, Texas, casting Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Hahn, and Griffin Dunne as the three leads in this story of a lopsided love triangle. Soloway has high hopes for the show's radical potential: “It’s just so powerful for a woman to say, ‘No, I’m not the object of your story,’ . . . ‘I’m the subject.’ Just that simple sentence is enough to upend the entire planet.”

In Turkey, forty-two journalists

The petition to restore novelist Dennis Cooper’s blog, which was deleted by Google without explanation, now has more than 3,000 signatures. Mark Edmund Doten, an editor at Soho Press and the author of the novel The Infernal, makes an impassioned plea at the petition’s webpage: “Google, give it back. We want all of it, the thousands of posts about art and literature, about roller coasters and defunct amusement parks, about haunted houses, optical illusions, and indie rock. We want the galleries of Halloween Masks and the tour of the Winchester Mystery House and Thomas Bernhard Day and the annual

Last night at the Republican National Convention, Jon Stewart took over the desk at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to deliver a Daily Show–style monologue ridiculing Donald Trump, the Republican party, and Fox News. The New York Times has a full transcript of Stewart’s remarks, which he kicked off with: “I thought Donald Trump was going to speak. Ivanka said that he was going to come out. She said he was really compassionate and generous, but then this angry groundhog came out and he just vomited on everybody for an hour.”

The New Yorker has a sensitive account of the aftermath of the

On Tuesday night, Charles Kinsey became the latest victim of a police shooting—a particularly baffling case since Kinsey, an unarmed African American caretaker trying to help an autistic patient playing in the street, was lying on the ground with his hands in the air when cops shot him in the leg. Kinsey survived and told the Miami Herald that the police “realize this was something inappropriate regarding the shooting. If

Embattled Fox News boss Roger Ailes, accused of sexual harassment by the television host Gretchen Carlson, is negotiating his exit from the network he started twenty years ago, according to one of Ailes’s lawyers. His career there ends as Fox-style rhetoric has all but taken over the GOP. As the New York Times writes: “Mr. Trump’s convention has been a triumph for Mr. Ailes’s brand of smash-mouth and ‘politically incorrect’ politics. . . . It is, in a way, the most Fox News-y convention in the network’s history.” Ailes’s imminent departure was announced as two more women, Megyn Kelly and Ann

In New York magazine, Gabriel Sherman—the author of The Loudest Voice in the Room—|http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/murdochs-have-decided-to-remove-roger-ailes.html#|reported| yesterday that Rupert Murdoch and his two sons are planning to get rid of Roger Ailes, the Fox News boss who has been sued by Gretchen Carlson for sexual harassment. 21st Century Fox, the network’s parent company, has recently hired a private law firm to conduct an independent review of the Ailes case. The company’s executives quickly responded to the New York article, saying that the Ailes case “is not yet

Late last week, Benjamin Wallace-Wells asked, “What Have the Freddie Gray Trials Achieved?” Today’s decision, to acquit Brian Rice, the highest-ranking officer charged in the case, affirms Wallace-Wells’s assertion that “whatever justice for Freddie Gray’s death looks like, it will probably not involve long prison sentences for cops.” Three more cops involved in the case are scheduled for trial in the coming months, but the lack of new evidence for upcoming trials and failure to convict in all preceding cases have legal experts and The Sun’s editorial board calling on Baltimore’s State Attorney

Le Monde’s front page on the morning after the terrorist attack in Nice shows a man praying next to a body covered with a sheet, and the publication also ran a grim gallery of images from the scene. The Nice-Martin’s headline “Ils s'appelaient Timothé, Fatima, Brodie... qui sont les premières victimes de l'attentat de Nice?” reveals the names of the first victims of the attack, while Charlie Hebdo posted a chilling cartoon on their Facebook page showing what happens “when religious fanatics are invited to secular holidays.” The network France 2 apologized for broadcasting a video interview