• July 15, 2016

    Bernie Sanders's Book Deal

    Bernie Sanders is getting a book deal. The former presidential candidate announced his upcoming book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, days after endorsing presumed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. With an announced publication date of November 15, some worry that possible critiques of Clinton in the book could be leaked just in time to impact the election.

    Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sorry she opened her mouth about Donald Trump. After calling the presumed Republican nominee “a faker” who “had been treated too gently by the press,” the Supreme Court justice backpedaled, saying her comments

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  • Roger Ailes
    July 14, 2016

    Gretchen Carlson talks to the Times; a biography of Theresa May

    Gretchen Carlson granted her first interview since filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox News head Roger Ailes. Carlson was unceremoniously let go in June, and while poor ratings have been cited by Fox as the reason for parting ways, the former host says ratings were never mentioned in the brief meeting before her dismissal. “It took 30 seconds, there was no ‘Thank you for your service of 11 years.'” New York's Gabriel Sherman asks, “Can the Murdochs Contain the Damage From the Ailes Investigation?” Judging from Sherman’s own investigation, the answer seems to be no. Other women have

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  • Sharon Dodua Otoo
    July 13, 2016

    Reading while black; Pokémon goings-on

    Louizandre Dauphin, a Canadian schoolteacher who is black, was pulled over by police after he “decided to take a drive to the Stonehaven Wharf and sit by the water . . . to pacify my mind by reading the works of Timothy Keller and C.S. Lewis.” Dauphin shared his experience on Instagram, posting a selfie of his skeptical face and writing, “Before any more Canadians get too comfortable on their high horses. . . . This week has not been easy for me. Amidst a number of personal and professional struggles, my mind has been occupied with the latest string of black males killed by the police over the

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  • Calvin Trillin
    July 12, 2016

    A new study finds blacks experience more violence at the hands of police

    A study of one-thousand shootings in ten major police departments found that black people experience more violence, in general, at the hands of the police than white people do: blacks are more likely to be manhandled, handcuffed, pushed to the ground, and pepper-sprayed. But they are no more likely to be shot. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” the study’s author Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard, told the New York Times. He emphasized that the results offered a partial view—more data would be necessary to compile an accurate picture of the country as a

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  • Sidney Schanberg
    July 11, 2016

    Claudia Rankine responds to the killing of Philando Castile

    Last year the Washington Post began Fatal Force, a database that provides information about American civilians who have been killed by police, providing, when the information is available, the victims’ gender, race, and age. As of July 11, 512 deaths have been recorded. In about 40 percent of the cases, Fatal Force also identifies the officers who killed. The Guardian is maintaining a similar database devoted to Americans killed by police; its list puts the number of deaths at 571.

    Claudia Rankine—whose award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric pointedly meditated on racism in America and

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  • July 08, 2016

    Gun violence stuns the nation

    “There has been a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement,” President Obama told reporters this morning. Last night, protests over the shootings of two black men by the police erupted into violence in Dallas, where a gunman carried out a sniper attack on a dozen police officers, five of whom died. “The shootings, only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, transformed an emotional but peaceful rally into a scene of carnage and chaos, and they injected a volatile new dimension into the anguished debate over racial disparities

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  • Hilde Lysiak
    July 07, 2016

    Kerfuffle at Fox News; Louise Linton's white woman's burden

    Graywolf Press announced the winner of its latest Nonfiction Prize: Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, a collection of essays that “cogently breaks open the social, historical, medical, and spiritual aspects” of mental illness, to be published in 2017. The book was chosen by a committee of Graywolf editors and Brigid Hughes, the editor of A Public Space. Weijun will receive a $12,000 advance. She joins an illustrious group: Previous winners include Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, and Kevin Young’s The Grey Album

    Scandal rears its ugly

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  • Jonah Lehrer
    July 06, 2016

    It's fine to procrastinate; Jonah Lehrer demystifies love

    Libraries—New York City and nationwide—are booming, reports the New York Times. At a moment when one might expect membership to be declining due to the atomizing effects of the Internet, libraries have expanded their mission to meet a range of needs in the populations they serve. They offer exercise and coding classes; Internet access, which the U.N. just designated a universal human right; air-conditioning in the summer; entertainment for toddlers; and a safe space for the homeless. "In the 2016 fiscal year," New York City libraries "received $360 million for operating costs, $33 million more

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  • Octavia Butler
    July 05, 2016

    How Octavia Butler Anticipated Trump

    Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz and won the Nobel Peace Prize, died in his Manhattan home this weekend. He was eighty-seven. The author of Night and many other books, Wiesel, writes Joseph Berger in the New York Times obituary, “more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience.”

    Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast, the second book in his trilogy of novels about our unfolding ecological disaster, is about to be published in the UK. The first installment, The Wake, was set during the Norman conquest and was written in a dialect partially based on Old English. Beast,

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  • Gay Talese
    July 01, 2016

    A plot twist for Gay Talese; a new trial for Adnan Syed

    Gay Talese’s latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel, comes out July 12 and recounts Talese’s correspondence and encounters with a motelier named Gerald Foos, who tells Talese he spent more than two decades spying on his guests’ amorous activities through specially constructed ceiling vents. In an excerpt in the New Yorker, Talese visits Foos and dips his toe in the muddy pool of voyeurism—or rather his tie, which he claims, quite incredibly, slipped between slats of a louvered vent and nearly blew his and Foos's cover. For his part, Foos supplied Talese with elaborate diary entries in which he details

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  • Alvin Toffler
    June 30, 2016

    Facebook reaffirms the importance of friends and family; Lena Dunham disses Kanye West

    Facebook announced that it would rejigger the algorithm of its most lucrative product. The News Feed, recently in the news itself after its editors were accused of behind-the-scenes tinkering and liberal bias, will privilege content that has been re-posted—i.e. pasted in afresh—by friends and family in your social network, over links supplied by publishers and news sites.

    Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, now a pundit for CNN, is said to have forfeited a $1.2 million book deal with HarperCollins when he refused to divulge the specifics of a nondisclosure agreement he

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  • Amy Schumer
    June 29, 2016

    Ambivalent fan-fic about Donald Trump; Amy Schumer's come-hither book cover

    On June 19, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a mock syllabus for a college course called Trump 101. This in turn inspired a number of professors to write a letter, calling the Trump syllabus “highly objectionable,” “intellectually dishonest,” and “irresponsible.” The letter points out that the CoHE syllabus has no books by writers of color, and that it “fails to include works on sexism, racism, whiteness, immigration, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or nativism.” Now, at the Public Books website, historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, who sought out advice from more than 100

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