Joshua Benton selects notable clips from the archives of Editor & Publisher, the self-described “bible of the newspaper industry.” The Internet Archive has digitized nearly every back issue in their catalog, starting from 1901.

At The Believer, Ahmed Naji chronicles his time reading and writing in an Egyptian prison, where he was sentenced to two years over obscenity charges against his novel Using Life. Naji’s fellow prisoners taught him to “rethink much of what I knew” about literature, and what readers want. One man, “a judge accused of taking a four-million-dollar bribe” told Naji that

Myriam Gurba responds to David Brooks’s recent op-ed against “teacher resistance” to opening schools, in which he invoked the spirit of Black Lives Matter, calling on readers to march in the streets in support of getting “Black and brown children back safely into schools right now.” Gurba, an author and educator whose parents were both teachers, points out that Brooks does not have similar expertise. Gurba writes, “Capitalism requires inequality, suffering and death and by re-warehousing Black and Brown students on shoddy campuses, places where COVID-19 is likely to spread, the acceptable cost

At Publishers Weekly, Shelly Romero and Adriana M. Martínez Figueroa revisit James Ledbetter’s “The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing,” a two-part feature that ran in the Village Voice in 1995. “Over the past quarter-century, book publishing has made some strides in diversifying its workforce and the authors it publishes, thanks in part to the efforts of many recently founded advocacy groups and movements, including We Need Diverse Books, People of Color in Publishing, and the #OwnVoices movement,” Romero and Martínez Figueroa write. And yet: “The parallels between publishing in 1995 and

Under the unassuming headline “announcement,” the London Review of Books has revealed that its legendary editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, is retiring after more than forty years. Deputy editor Jean McNicol and senior editor Alice Spawls will be taking over for Wilmers. The new editors said: “The LRB is the best paper in the world, thanks to Mary-Kay, and we intend to keep it that way. We’ve never wanted to work anywhere else, and indeed neither of us ever has.” For more on Wilmers’s career as a writer and editor, see Kaitlin Phillips's review of Wilmers’s collected essays in the Dec/Jan 2020 issue of

On Twitter, the New Yorker Union gives an update on their latest negotiations: “management came to the table empty-handed Wednesday, and, a couple of hours after we broke for a caucus, they told us they would not be providing any of the 20+ counterproposals we’re waiting on, aborting a bargaining session that was scheduled to last a full day.” The meeting came a week after the union enacted a twenty-four hour work stoppage.

Lit Hub explains what you need to know about Literati, a book-club service that recently raised $40 million dollars in investment funding.

The New York Times has named

Claire Foy will star in the film adaptation of The Pisces, Melissa Broder’s 2018 novel of one woman’s obsession with a merman. Broder wrote the script with director Gillian Robespierre.

At The Nation, Stephen Kearse writes about N. K. Jemisin’s experience writing speculative fiction as a Black woman, her approach to the genre as sociological investigation, and her fascination with cities. Her latest novel, The City We Became, follows five characters who embody New York’s five boroughs: “Jemisin’s characters rally around the shared experience of their worlds expanding. Representing a borough

Marty Baron of the Washington Post has announced that he is retiring at the end of February. Baron had been the executive editor of the paper for the last eight years, a period in which the Post dramatically increased its staff and its digital subscription model became successful. Before joining the Post, Baron was at the Boston Globe, where he oversaw reporting on sexual abuse by priests in the city.

The Cut profiles critic Lauren Oyler, whose debut novel, Fake Accounts, will be published next Tuesday. Known as a tough critic unafraid to write a takedown, Oyler professes to being serene about

Authors Ken Chen and Craig Morgan Tiecher highlight their favorite books of poetry coming out in 2021.

Marcela Valdes, a journalist who has held positions at Publishers Weekly and Washington Post Book World, has been hired as a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. In a letter announcing the hire, editor Jake Silverstein writes: “Marcela has been an important contributor to the Magazine for many years, covering politics, culture, immigration and more. Her recent cover story on conservative efforts to win Latino votes in the 2020 election showed, yet again, what a rigorous, intelligent

At the Paris Review Daily blog, Elisa Gabbert writes about the internal logic and contradictions of Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, and how “the structure of the institution creates the conditions for insanity.” In the novel, a ninety-two-year-old Englishwoman is committed to a bizarre home run by “the Well of Light Brotherhood” where her room features fake furniture: “All fictive furniture is fake, but this novel has real fake furniture and fake fake furniture. Here the novelist seems to be poking holes and peeking through the text.”

This past weekend, friends and colleagues

The New Yorker Union is enacting a work stoppage for twenty-four hours starting at 6 AM today. The union is protesting the response to their wage proposal, which included a salary floor of $65,000, among other provisions. According to the union, management’s response was a floor of $45,000 and a proposal that would allow them to decrease union members’ salaries at any time. As the union writes in a statement posted today, “The company’s proposal showed disrespect for us and for the work we do. Today’s work stoppage is meant to remind The New Yorker and Condé Nast of the value of our labor, and

At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy, which she praises for its composure, noting: “For all the expected reasons, no quality is praised more strenuously in women’s writing than ‘control.’ See also ‘restraint’ and ‘lack of sentimentality.’ But control is just one effect, and in some ways the canniest — nothing else so efficiently earns the reader’s trust and can lull her into sleepy credulity.”

Writers make predictions on “Life After Trump” for a special supplement in the new issue of Harper’s Magazine. They cover an array of topics; read Charles Yu

ProPublica have combed through more than five hundred videos from Parler to reveal a fuller picture of the Capitol invasion. On one video, a man says, “I think they’re going to breach the doors. It’s getting serious. Someone’s going to die today. It’s not good at all.”

The Advocate recommends twenty-two LGBTQ+ books to read in 2021, with new titles by Melissa Febos, Sarah Schulman, Brandon Taylor, Torrey Peters, and more.

LitHub has an excerpt from Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires detailing what happened that one time Patricia Highsmith went to the Yaddo writers’ retreat