At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter gives the backstory on how the Pulitzer-winning presidential historian Jon Meacham, “who is not a Democrat,” came to speak at the Democratic National Convention. “Until now, Mr. Meacham has avoided any whiff of partisanship in his work,” Alter writes. “While he delivered eulogies at the funerals of George Bush and the former first lady Barbara Bush, he has never before spoken at a political rally or convention. He agreed to speak this week because he felt it was important to make an argument informed by history for why the country needs new leadership.”

At Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen outlines four points about “what makes a message ‘feel’ true” from a new collection of research on fake news: repetition, pronounceability, familiarity, and “regular photos.” You can download and read the collection, The Psychology of Fake News, for free from Routledge.

For the New York Times, Kyle Buchanan and Reggie Ugwu scrutinize the Criterion Collection’s “blind spots.” Namely, “though the collection features the directorial debuts of multiple generations of white auteurs—including Gus Van Sant, Noah Baumbach, David Gordon Green and Lena Dunham—it has no

Members of the National Book Critics Circle have released an open letter with short- and long-term recommendations for the organization to better address systemic racism. The letter calls for the cancelation of the 2020 NBCC awards and ceremony, and asks “to prioritize anti-racist labor, institutional accountability, and organizational restructuring immediately.” In June, more than half the NBCC board resigned after a dispute over a statement drafted in support of Black Lives Matter.

At the Washington Post, a look at the art of the Zoom book tour.

At Gothamist, Danny Lewis reports on efforts

Vox Media has agreed to pay a $4 million settlement in the cases of three collective-action lawsuits brought by former SB Nation “team site” workers, who were lowly paid if paid at all.

Vice is expanding its audio division, with a dozen new hires and promotions in addition to hiring Arielle Duhaime-Ross, of Vox Media’s Recode, to host their upcoming news podcast. According to Kate Osborn, the company’s vice president of audio, Vice has plans to launch three other shows: one focusing on the global climate crisis, another about authoritarianism, and a third “experimental” project involving

At Poynter, a story on the crisis in international reporting as a result of the pandemic: “At a time when global coverage has never been more important, the coronavirus has created a devastating cocktail of economic turmoil and heightened risks that throw the fate of foreign reporting into jeopardy.”

Beginning on August 22nd, writers, actors, librarians, and young readers will participate in a read-a-thon for Ray Bradbury’s centennial. Participants include Marlon James, William Shatner, and Susan Orlean.

At the New Republic, Alex Shephard diagnoses why the media is uniquely terrible at covering

At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about Cherie Dimaline, Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Darcie Little Badger, and Stephen Graham Jones—“Indigenous novelists reshaping North American science fiction, horror and fantasy.” Dimaline says: “There’s a big push now for the telling of Indigenous stories. The only way I know who I am and who my community is, and the ways in which we survive and adapt, is through stories.”

In Portland, Oregon, around twenty independent journalists have banded together to report on the Black Lives Matter protests, and have been selling their footage to

Hannah Black discusses why rent strikes are so difficult to organize on a large scale, and looks to the possibilities of current efforts in cities across the country for Dissent. Tenant organizing, Black writes, “is part of a long tradition of situating politics in concrete everyday survival rather than focusing on abstract categories of law and labor, an orientation toward struggle familiar in black and indigenous contexts but often hard for mass movements to come to grips with.”

At the Paris Review Daily, Aracelis Girmay revisits the work of former Maryland poet laureate Lucille Clifton,

New York Times editor Jazmine Hughes is taking on a new role, in which she will be writing full time for the paper and for the New York Times Magazine.

At The Believer Logger, Niela Orr writes about Whitney Houston’s friendship with Robyn Crawford. Reviewing Crawford’s memoir, A Song for You, Orr observes: “In its resistance to tell all, the book is a marvelous document of the closet, of bi-erasure, romantic longing, unrequited love, queer subtext, and textual elusiveness.”

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new generation of audio content, as publications scramble to create listenable

At the Engaged Journalism Lab, a guide to how journalists and those who fund them can act in solidarity with marginalized communities.

At the New York Times, A. O. Scott looks at Edward P. Jones’s intricate body of fiction, which is deeply tied to specific, real locations in Washington, D. C., and does not pander to white readers. “It might go without saying — though nothing really does — that a white reader enters Jones’s world from a different angle,” Scott writes. “What comes as news to me may strike you as a gentle reminder of something you always knew. What I feel as revelation you might

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai looks at the crackdown on independent media in Belarus, as thousands of people protest the reelection of president Alexander Lukashenko.

At Zora, an interview with Akwaeke Emezi, the author of the forthcoming novel The Death of Vivek Oji about the influence of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez on their work, how their background as a poet shaped the novel, and why they enjoyed writing the new book’s sex scenes.

Ian Penman writes about Elvis for the London Review of Books: “Elvis was born into a puzzle, a world marked by loss from the start. From his first

Yale University Press has released the stunning, birds-in-flight cover design for Susan Bernofsky’s forthcoming, much anticipated biography of Robert Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small.

Ben Affleck will direct the screen adaptation of Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.

Amitava Kumar has been asking authors he admires for distilled, pithy writing advice. Now, at the New York Times, he has published some of the responses. Lydia Davis: “Read the masters and, at least occasionally, read them closely!” Zadie Smith: “Don’t confuse honors with achievement.”

Simon & Schuster has released the financial report for the second quarter of 2020—the first such report released since Jonathan Karp took over as CEO of the publisher. The report shows that revenue fell 8 percent, compared with the same quarter in 2019, but that earnings were up 9 percent, due to “lower production and distribution costs” (digital sales, for instance, are way up). The company, says Karp, “picked its shots” in promoting books that had bestseller potential, namely John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened and Chris Wallace’s Countdown 1945. As for the rest of the year: Mary Trump’s