After the killings in Charleston this week, Ta-Nehisi Coates says the Confederate flag must at long last be taken down: "Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol."

At the Guardian, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has a long and entertaining account of Politico’s recent expansion into the famously stuffy, unglamorous world of the EU: “Can Politico make Brussels sexy?” It seems a tall order, though certainly “an experiment with far-reaching implications, not only for the future of journalism but, perhaps, for the European

Could 2016 mark the end of Fox News as we know it? Its chairman, Roger Ailes, a man so powerful, as Gabriel Sherman puts it, “that he has been able to run a right-wing political operation under the auspices of a news channel,” appears to be struggling. At the Daily Intelligencer, Sherman gives an intriguing account of Ailes’s troubled relationship with James Murdoch, who is about to take over from his father as CEO of Fox (in private, Ailes has apparently referred to James as a “fucking dope” and “Fredo”). The failure of Ailes’s public attempt to keep reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch has

In the Dominican Republic, after today’s deadline to register with government authorities, hundreds of thousands of workers, mostly of Haitian origin, will face deportation; Harper’s has just removed the paywall from Rachel Nolan’s frightening and essential account of the context, which appeared in its May 2015 issue.

It’s worth watching this weekend’s bizarre appearance on CNN by Tom Harper of the Sunday Times (UK), which had just published an evidence-free lead story titled “British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.” Even the most basic questions about the story were met with “don’t

Rachel Dolezal, an NAACP leader who has been accused of posing as African-American, stepped down yesterday, and will today give several TV interviews. In the New York Times magazine, a historian explores earlier examples of such “reverse passing;” and on his blog, Lenin’s Tomb, Richard Seymour asks “the interesting question”: “Why is race so resilient despite being so malleable, and despite having no fundamental reality outside of power?”

The poet James Fenton has won this year’s PEN Pinter Prize, set up in memory of Harold Pinter in 2009. The judges included the playwright’s widow, Antonia

Gawker Media is preparing for its legal battle with Hulk Hogan, who is asking that the media company give him $100 million for posting a sex-tape featuring the legendary wrestler. The trial begins on July 6 in Florida, and pivots on Gawker’s argument that the tape was “newsworthy.” Most legal experts expect Gawker to win, but the fact that the trial is taking place in Hogan’s hometown could affect the results. As Fortune points out: “The case is important not only because Hogan wants $100 million, which could ruin Gawker, but also because it highlights how Gawker is alone among new media

The Huffington Post has dug up Jeb Bush’s 1995 book Profiles in Character, and quotes extensively from a chapter titled “The Restoration of Shame.” There, the former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate argued that “public humiliations” might help deter women from having children “out of wedlock.” In the course of his argument, Bush cites an American literary classic: “Infamous shotgun weddings and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter are reminders that public condemnation of irresponsible sexual behavior has strong historical roots.”

In response to author Kamila Shamsie’s article

Juan Felipe Herrera, a Mexican-American who was raised by migrant farm workers, has been named the new United States Poet Laureate. Herrera’s work includes Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border, and the Library of Congress points out that his poetry, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, captures “our larger American identity.”

“You have to wing it. If you don’t then it seems like it’s written from an outline. And the idea is to start to set yourself some impossible kind of place to get to, and it becomes an adventure.” FSG has published Laura Miller’s

At The Guardian, Sophie Elmhirst profiles author and biologist Richard Dawkins, who is on a “global quest to broadcast the wonder of science and the nonexistence of God.” The article presents Dawkins—whose books include The God Delusion and An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist—as a seemingly tireless and increasingly divisive scholar. “For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage.”

Alexis Madrigal writes about a new book titled Iterating Grace, a satire of tech startup culture that has been circulating around San Francisco. The question is: who wrote it? “No one knows who wrote the story or created the book,” Madrigal writes. “No one knows what the person who did it all wants. Most people I know who’ve received the book, who are all either journalists or authors, think it is some sort of dark-arts marketing scheme. They think Microsoft or Google or some startup is behind this whole production, and that the commercial purpose of this thing will soon be revealed to us.”

The stage adaptation of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home won the Tony for Best Musical.

In response to Book Expo America’s spotlight on China, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Francine Prose, Murong Xuecun, and A.M. Homes staged a protest on the steps of the New York Public Library, reading works by Chinese authors who had been imprisoned and censored, and holding pictures of artist Ai Weiwei and the Tibetan writer Woeser. At the New Yorker, Christopher Beam reports on the dissent, and reaffirms what many noticed when walking by the large, front-and-center China section at BEA: that it did

In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that Gawker’s editorial employees have voted to unionize—joining the Writers Guild of America, East—a Politico staffer has asked his colleagues to redouble their efforts to unionize as well. As Erik Wemple pointed out on his blog earlier this year, it may be a tough sell.

Ali Smith has been awarded the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel How to Be Both.

At Vanity Fair, a profile of power couple Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge includes new details about the mass exodus at the New Republic a few years after Hughes took charge.

The Paris Review

The in-progress takeover of AOL by Verizon has left the future of the Huffington Post in doubt. AOL is HuffPo’s parent company, and while Arianna Huffington has unveiled ambitious plans for the site’s future, she is currently between contracts and, according to New York Times sources, isn’t sure if her plans can be realized under the Verizon banner. As an anonymous Huffpo staffer writes at Gawker, words like demoralized are now frequently used to describe the mood in Arianna-land, but, really, it has always been that way: “To anyone who has worked at the site for any period of time, as I have,