Nearly twenty years into its history, the Thurber Prize for American Humor will finally be going to a woman (either Annabelle Gurwitch, Roz Chast, or Julie Schumacher) on September 28.

Donald Trump and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes are continuing to do battle (for one thing, Trump revived his attack on Megyn Kelly last night). Ailes means well, according to an unnamed source who talked to Gabriel Sherman: “Roger says Trump is unelectable. His goal here is to save the country.”

Music critic David Hajdu has gone out on a limb and made his own album. Being interviewed about it by The Observer also

After announcing the death of culture in his new book, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa finds yet more evidence of it in a New York Times review (quite a trenchant and perceptive one, if you ask us) by Joshua Cohen. Vargas Llosa’s objection to some “slanderous and perfidious . . . gossip” originally included in the piece has prompted a long and delightful NYT correction. (Note to fact-checkers: the Daily Mail doesn’t count as a source.)

The anti-diversity (or pro-”quality”) faction at sci-fi’s legendary Hugo Awards appears to have lost this round.

Amid a “dystopian landscape” for magazines,

Morrissey, whose Autobiography was published by Penguin Classics in 2014, has announced that his first novel, List of the Lost, will be released in late September. The author and his publisher are offering up no other information. According to the Independent: “There are no details yet about what the novel will be about.”

If commentators are attributing “megalomaniacal billionaire” Donald Trump’s political success to populism, what does that say about our definition of populism? Not much, says Rich People Things author and Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann. “The Beltway definition of populism is

Jonathan Franzen Carli Lloyd, who captained the US national women’s soccer team at this year’s World Cup, is publishing a memoir. Too bad David Foster Wallace isn’t around to review it.

And, apparently one primary function of the DFW film has been to make magazine-profile writers feel like a bunch of creeps.

People still can’t decide how to feel about H. P. Lovecraft.

Someone has translated the dream journal of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, discoverer of neurons, who wrote down his dreams from 1918 and his death in 1934 in an attempt to disprove Freud's theories.

“Writing novels seemed like the

At the New York Times magazine, Steven Johnson has crunched the numbers and says, contra years of post-Napster scaremongering about what the digital economy would do to artists and writers, that creative types are still mostly doing fine.

Donald Trump celebrates himself and sings himself on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter. Asked when he last apologized for something, he says: “It was too many years ago to remember. I have one of the great memories of all time, but it was too long ago.” On the competition: Hillary Clinton’s email debacle was “Watergate on steroids”; Jeb Bush, though a nice

The New York Times searches its soul over whether its Amazon story was fair. Meanwhile, the Onion, not for the first time, struggles to preserve the distinction between its satire and straight reporting.

Mostly ignoring the chic starriness that clings to Joan Didion in so much of the coverage of her, Louis Menand traces the significant change in Didion’s work and worldview through the decades. Plus there’s a nice nod to the art of the disclaimer: “(Full disclosure: you are reading this piece in The New Yorker).”

Who’d be Gawker’s lawyer? Only the brave.

The Center for Fiction announced the

Renata Adler expressed her solidarity with Buzzfeed writers when she went to their HQ for an interview earlier this year: “The embarrassing part about writing something, and having it published, is the part right after when you’re thinking, Oh my god, what are people going to think? If you’re having one piece every three years, that’s it, it’s done. But if you have to write three times a week, the only way to get rid of the embarrassment is to try the next piece, and hope it will be better, and erase the last piece. Which is probably what you want. You want to just keep going forward. Is that

actual facts, starting now.”

Between 1960 and the early 1970s, the FBI assembled a file on author James Baldwin that contains 1,884 pages.

Dan Duray recently re-read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and was reminded that Patrick Bateman, the titular character, worshipped  Donald Trump.

“What did people do before Prozac?” Lucia Berlin wrote in a letter to Lydia Davis. “Beat up horses I guess.” You can read a version of Davis’s foreword to Berlin’s stories on the New Yorker site (so do).

Better to read Moby-Dick on your phone than not to read it at all.

Jay Parini writes about Gore Vidal’s greatest feuds and the “effort, strenuous at times” to stay friends with him.

And poor David Foster Wallace has been dragged into an arcaneargument about who counts as a bro in the literary world.

Still, Joan Didion has a related problem. At the Atlantic, Meghan Daum reads the new biography

You may remember the UK's former PM, Tony Blair. Judging by recent polls, his once-progressive party, Labour, may soon return to something like its pre-Blair roots, as left-wing social democrat Jeremy Corbyn seems poised to win the leadership. Now, at the ready with metaphors mixed—are Labour Party members playing sports? Sleepwalking outside? Scripting a horror film?—Blair has published what might be the op-ed of the year: “The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. . . . It is a moment for a rugby tackle if that were possible. . . . We

The Intercept turns the surveillance tables on an NSA analyst, the so-called “Socrates of SIGINT,” who, it turns out, also writes fiction.

At the Atlantic, Caleb Crain reviews the new Jonathan Franzen. Surely it must be nearly time for Nell Zink to share her thoughts too.

The still-newish New Republic is redesigning itself, more or less eliminating any distinction between the print and web versions along the way. No matter what they do, former literary editor Leon Wieseltier is predictably unimpressed.

Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing are going to publish books together—

Yesterday a state of emergency was declared in Ferguson after another police shooting. Meanwhile, in an interview about his book Between the World and Me, Roxane Gay asks Ta-Nehisi Coates whether it ever feels “all too much,” when seemingly “every week, if not every day, we have a new tragedy to mourn.” He responds: “Never. This has always been life. . . . I know we’re in this new moment where it seems like the police have suddenly gone crazy. But police violence is not new and it is only the most spectacular end of a range of violence black people live under.”

And, describing his reading