The poet Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first Youth Poet Laureate, has been chosen to read at President Biden’s inauguration. The title of her inauguration poem is “The Hill We Climb.”

Sally Rooney has sold her third novel to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Beautiful World, Where Are You will be published in September 2021. According to FSG, the novel is about four people in Ireland who “are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. . . . Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing

At the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner talks with Rick Perlstein about the second Trump impeachment, the wide-ranging effects of Gerald Ford’s presidential pardon of Richard Nixon, and historical continuity and discontinuity: “One of the reasons I’m very hesitant to speculate about what happens next in history is, no one really saw Reagan coming,” Perstein said. “The idea that someone who never criticized Richard Nixon over Watergate would soon be seen as the redeemer of the country, or that a figure like Jimmy Carter, who seemed to have met the moment, turned out to be such a disappointment—that’s

Noah Baumbach is adapting Don DeLillo’s White Noise for the screen. The film is said to star Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver.

At Entertainment Weekly, Seija Rankin has a short Q&A with Maggie Nelson about her new book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. When asked what the first thing she remembers writing was, Nelson replied: “A fourth-grade report called ‘Cats Galore!’ I still have fond feelings toward the word galore.”

Editors at the New York Post have instructed staff not to use the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, or the Washington Post as sources for reporting.

Powell’s bookstore

Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist on criminal justice and author of They Can’t Kill Us All, is joining the Marshall Project. As a contributing editor, he will help the organization expand into local reporting.

At n+1, Vincent Bevins writes about the confused comparisons used by politicians, brands, and entertainers “randomly grasping for imagery from the bad, brown world beyond our borders” to describe the attempted coup at the capitol last week. George W. Bush, for example, likened the events of January 6 to how election results “are disputed in a banana republic,” eliding the

The London Review of Books has put together a collection of pieces from the paper on “How (not) to stage a coup,” featuring work by Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens, Patricia Beer, and more.

The Story Prize, sponsored by the Chisholm Foundation, has announced its finalists for the year: Danielle Evans, Deesha Philyaw, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.

A group of NPR stations has sent a letter criticizing the New York Times, producer Andy Mills, and host Michael Barbaro for their handling of the Caliphate podcast controversy. (One of the central figures of that show was later found to have probably

Ved Mehta, a writer for the New Yorker for thirty years, has died. Mehta’s books include Walking the Indian Streets, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, and twelve volumes of memoir collectively titled Continents of Exile. “Ved Mehta has established himself as one of the magazine’s most imposing figures,” New Yorker editor William Shawn told the New York Times in 1982.

In August, Pauline Harmange’s debut book I Hate Men was published in a run of four hundred copies by the nonprofit French press Monstrograph. An employee of France’s ministry for gender equality, Ralph Zurmély, emailed the publisher

At Politico and the New York Times, journalists recount their experiences inside the Capitol building when a pro-Trump mob forced entry on Wednesday.

At Indian Country Today, Dalton Walker contrasts the meager use of force by Capitol police on the mob with the aggressive tactics used by the National Guard on pipeline opponents at Standing Rock in 2016.

At Poynter, Katy Byron previews the year in misinformation for 2021. Needless to say, it’s not looking good, with Byron’s big three predictions being “it’s going to get uglier,” “pandemic and political disinformation will dominate,” and, on a

Yesterday, as a pro-Trump mob breached barriers at the US Capitol, interal discussion boards at Facebook calling for banning Trump from the site were silenced by supervisors. One of the threads that was frozen included comments such as “Can we get some courage and actual action from leadership in response to this behavior?,” and, “We should do better.”

Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook is indeed banning Trump from their platforms indefinitely. Trump has also been suspended from Twitter, and Shopify took down his online store.

Masha Gessen asks why the Capitol police allowed the

Nieman Lab has asked “some of the smartest people in journalism” for their 2021 predictions.

Hanif Abdurraqib writes about his gratitude for Eric Jerome Dickey, the best-selling novelist who died yesterday at age fifty-nine. For Abdurraqib, Dickey was an inspiration not just for his output, but for his roundabout path to becoming an author: “I’m always thankful for the life he lived before that. A life where he was still a writer, no matter what else he was doing.”

At Entertainment Weekly, read an excerpt of Interior Chinatown author Charles Yu’s latest work of fiction.

At The Cut, MacArthur

The Cut has named Lindsay Peoples Wagner as its new editor in chief. Peoples Wagner was formerly the editor of Teen Vogue and a one-time fashion editor at The Cut.

At Vulture, Lila Shapiro gives a full debrief of the American Dirt controversy, one of the biggest book stories of 2020.

At the New Yorker, Hua Hsu remembers the masked wordsmith MF Doom, whose death at age forty-nine was reported this week. Hsu writes of the late rapper and producer, “He was an artist who took experiences that might have turned someone else cynical and cold and channelled them into a persona that retained a kind

Fran Lebowitz talks about her latest film project, Pretend It’s a City, with Martin Scorsese.

New work by Lauren Groff, Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Hanif Abdurraqib, Louise Glück, Maggie Nelson, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, and many more: The Guardian has published a list of books and literary events to “look forward to this year.”

Bozoma Saint John, the global chief marketing officer for Netflix, has sold a memoir, The Urgent Life, to Viking.

The latest episode of the Slate Money podcast features an interview with Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

The hedge fund Alden Global is looking to buy national newspaper chain Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Daily News, and other papers. Alden is currently Tribune’s largest shareholder and, as the Wall Street Journal notes, “A deal would have far-reaching implications for an industry beset by sharp declines in revenue over the past 20 years that have led to a wave of consolidation and cost cuts.” Tribune has laid off reporters and shut down newsrooms in 2020 as well sold off its e-commerce business.

At the New York Times, John Williams recaps the year