The former coeditor of n+1, Nikil Saval, has been elected to represent the first district in the Pennsylvania State Senate. The New York Times Style section covered Saval’s candidacy in May.

At The Nation, D. D. Guttenplan reports on progressive activists in Pennsylvania: “Let the record show that if Joe Biden wins here, he was carried to victory on the backs of the Latinx and immigrant activists in Make the Road, the young Green New Deal enthusiasts in the Sunrise Movement, and the self-organized collection of mostly Bernie Sanders alums who provide the muscle behind Pennsylvania Stands Up.

The London Review of Books is hosting a Twitter takeover for election night. From 5 PM to 3AM EST, contributors including Merve Emre, Stephanie Burt, Lauren Oyler, and Christian Lorentzen will tweet from the LRB’s account at will.

Today, The Nation’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, will be “keeping an eye on the news and trying to keep you informed about challenges to people exercising their vote.” The “Election Day issue-spotter log” will be updated in real time here.

Following a baffling tweet from Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance about daylight saving time and fertility, Belt Publishing

Yesterday, Jewish Currents editor David Klion posted a profile of Emily Ratajkowski, written by Thomas Chatterton Williams and Valentine Faure, that ran in the French edition of Marie Claire. A translation of the article has Williams describing Ratajkowski as having been “blessed with the most perfect breasts of her generation.” Williams also expresses surprise at the fact that Ratajkowski has read Roberto Bolaño. Ratajkowski herself has weighed in: “I really hope this will be the last of my ‘she has breasts AND claims to read’ profiles/interviews. Lots of levels of gross/embarrassing aspects

The Black Writers’ Guild has published a letter, signed by 101 members, “in support of antiracist writers and freedom of speech without misrepresentation” in response to recent comments made by UK Minister of Equalities Kemi Badenoch. For The Guardian, Sian Cain reports that Badenoch claimed some best-selling authors of antiracist books “actually want a segregated society.” In their letter, Guild members write that Badenoch’s allegation “is not only clearly false but dangerous” and call on the government to ensure ministers “act with a duty of care.”

Wear Your Voice, a digital magazine by and

Bernardine Evaristo, the 2019 Booker Prize winner, selects six novels for Penguin UK’s “Black Britain: Writing Black” series. The new editions of books by Jacqueline Roy, S. I. Martin, C. L. R. James, Nicola Williams, Judith Bryan, and Mike Phillips will be published in February 2021.

At Jewish Currents, Jess Bergman writes about Susan Taubes and her novel Divorcing, which is based on Taubes’s own separation from her husband Jacob and is newly back in print from New York Review Books. In the novel, Bergman notes, the uncoupling happens early, and “the ongoingness implied by the title’s gerund

Daniel Menaker, author and longtime editor for the New Yorker and Random House, passed away Monday at age seventy-nine. Over the years, he worked with Pauline Kael, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, V. S. Pritchett, and the formerly anonymous author of Primary Colors, a roman à clef of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Menaker’s final work, a recently completed book of poems about having cancer during the pandemic titled Terminalia, will be published and distributed this fall by Portal Press and n+1.

The twenty-second annual Southern Music issue of Oxford American is available for preorder and

In their Power Issue, the New Yorker has published a lengthy excerpt from former President Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, about his administration’s health care reforms.

At the New Republic, Tope Folarin discusses what it means that writers of color are walled off from “a genre that critics seem to constantly write about and whose practitioners are held up as the preeminent voices of their generation?” In a discussion of the whiteness of what critics and publishing houses deem autofiction, Folarin argues that the genre would “obviously benefit immensely” from stories about people “

Poet Diane di Prima, author of Revolutionary Letters and many other books, has died.

On October 16, Delhi Police assaulted Ahan Penkar, a journalist on staff at The Caravan, at a police station while he was reporting on the alleged murder and rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Now, Amitava Kumar—author of many books, most recently Every Day I Write the Book—has responded to the attack with a poem.

For the New York Review of Books’ special election issue, Jacqueline Rose dwells on “The Pleasures of Authoritarianism”: “No point . . . asking how bad it can get, how far they are willing to go, or

Alexis Okeowo profiles Saidiya Hartman and looks at the imaginative leaps taken in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, rather than fiction or nonfiction. “Fact is simply fiction endorsed with state power,” Hartman told Okeowo, discussing the limits of the archive in telling stories of enslaved people. “Are we going to be consigned forever to tell the same kinds of stories? Given the violence and power that has engendered this limit, why should I be faithful to that limit? Why should I respect that?”

Alexandra

At the New Republic, David Klion looks at a new anthology of writing from The Atlantic from the last four years. Klion sees the magazine’s project as one of defending “American liberalism in the face of Trump’s clownish barbarism.” But, Klion argues, the default position of insistent reasonableness may have run its course: “What really comes through is the institutional voice of The Atlantic, which makes itself felt in nearly every contribution: clean, authoritative, high-minded, rigorously empirical, more than a bit self-righteous—and, once you’ve heard it enough times, utterly tedious.”

In the New York Times, Joshua Cohen reviews Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence: “DeLillo has never been content with merely reporting, however: He wants to tell us not just what-is, but how it feels, and it’s this ability to transcribe the moment’s emotion that constitutes his genius.”

At Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop looks at how “herd immunity” and a potential COVID-19 vaccine are covered by the press: “In the absence of hard facts, many journalists, especially on TV, elide doubts, or filter the story of the pandemic through the familiar certitudes of partisan politics.”

A sneak

The New York Review of Books has released its election issue. The magazine features dispatches and essays from Vivian Gornick, Hari Kunzru, Jacqueline Rose, Darryl Pinckney, and many more. Rose writes in her standout piece, “The Pleasures of Authoritarianism”: No point . . . asking how bad it can get, how far they are willing to go, or how on earth they can get away with it all. Going too far is the point. The transgression is the draw and the appeal.”

A look at Barry Jenkins’s adaption of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

At the Paris Review Daily, Joy Williams offers an appreciation