In an op-ed for the Washington Post, author Jill Lepore urges us to “let history, not partisans, prosecute Trump.” “Surely, post-Trump, when that day comes, there will be investigations,” Lepore writes. “A bipartisan, 9/11-style commission to study the federal government’s response to the pandemic seems not only likely but essential. And Harvard Law School’s Mark Tushnet has argued for a non-prosecutorial, fact-finding “commission of inquiry” to investigate possible abuses of power by the Trump-era Justice Department. But the Trump administration is not Nazi Germany, nor is it a nation defeated

Bhanu Kapil, Shane McRae, and Natalie Diaz are among the poets shortlisted for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Five of the ten titles on the list are out from recently established presses, and three are debut collections.

“Why do we believe one set of paranoid, questionable hypotheses and not another?” N. K. Jemisin introduces Time’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time,” which presents influential works of fantasy fiction in chronological order, starting from the ninth century. For Jemisin, the genre is best thought of not as “mere entertainment,” but “as a way to train for reality.”

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Ava DuVernay will direct the Netflix adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.

The longtime theater critic Ben Brantley reflects on his twenty-seven-year career as he gets ready to retire. In the New York Times’s “Exit Interview” column, Brantley tells Jesse Green what it feels like to be insulted by the likes of James Franco, Alec Baldwin, and Josh Brolin following critiques of their work: “I expected the blowback, and it came pretty quickly. The public put-downs from celebrity stars are to be savored, I think.”

At the Covering Climate Now, Mark Hertsgaard writes

The American Booksellers Association is launching its “Boxed Out” marketing campaign today, with fourteen independent bookstores across the country participating in the drive to divert Amazon revenue to indies amid the ongoing pandemic and through the holiday shopping season. The campaign features storefront installations designed to mimic the look of brown cardboard boxes, and are printed with such declarations as, “Amazon, please leave the dystopia to George Orwell.”

The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon foundations have named twenty creatives who will receive inaugural grants as part of their new

At the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner considers Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence. Garner remains “as attracted as anyone else to stories of doomed airplane flights and intimations of the end of the world, and DeLillo mostly held me rapt,” but admits that the 117-page story “reads like the first two chapters of a disaster novel.” In the paper’s magazine, David Marchese asked the interview-shy author why a mention of COVID-19 in an early copy of the novel was later removed. DeLillo replied: “I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that

Joe Klein weighs in on Carlos Lozada’s new book, What We Were Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. “In 2015, Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic, took on a harrowing task: He read eight books ‘written’ by Donald Trump. Soon, he expanded the mandate, reading everything he could about Trump and the Trump era—150 books in all. It was an act of transcendent masochism, but we should be grateful he did it because What Were We Thinking looks past the obvious and perverse—that is, past Trump himself—to the troublesome questions raised by the

Best-selling crime fiction novelist Walter Mosley will be awarded the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, making him the first Black man to receive the distinction. Mosley’s work has been adapted for film and TV, and has been recognized with the Edgar Award, an O. Henry Prize, and even a Grammy. Said foundation director Lisa Lucas: “His oeuvre and his lived experience are distinctly part of the American experience.”

At Slate, listen to Louise Glück, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, read three poems: “A Myth of Innocence,” “Crater Lake,” and “The Open Grave.”

Poet Louise Glück has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For more on Glück, see Dan Chiasson’s 2012 New Yorker essay, “The Body Artist,” in which he writes: “Her poems are flash bulletins from her inner life, a region that she examines unsparingly.”

At The Intercept, Peter Maass argues that Glück should refuse the prize. Criticizing the Nobel committee's decision to award the prize to Peter Handke last year, and writing about the 2018 Academy sexual misconduct scandal, Maass obsereves, “It is laughable and tragic that an award of such influence should be controlled by a tiny and

At Literary Hub, Aaron Robertson considers the New Yorker Union’s recent victory in their campaign to end “at will” employment at the magazine.

At the New Republic, Alex Shephard adds his voice to Nobel Prize speculation season. In 2016, Shephard vowed that he would eat his copy of the album Blood On the Tracks if Bob Dylan won the Nobel. (Dylan did, Shephard didn’t.) Since then, Shephard has learned to embrace the prize’s unpredictability: “The only certainty about the Nobel Committee is that it does what it wants, while the only certainty about 2020 is that crazy shit happens all the time.”

The New Yorker Union has reached an agreement with management to add a “just cause” clause to their collective bargaining agreement, ending the era of at-will employment. Senator Elizabeth Warren, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and former attorney general Eric Holder had joined a boycott of last night’s festival events before an agreement had been reached. The president of the NewsGuild of New York, Susan DeCarava, told CNN: “I do want to give some credit to management at the New Yorker for finally being able to listen and hear what their employees were saying and how important it

The National Memo has an excerpt of Joe Conason’s preface to Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption, a collection of writings by legendary investigative reporter Wayne Barrett (1945–2017). As a longtime writer at the Village Voice, Barrett wrote articles about city politics and corruption that “made him the scourge of City Hall, the bane of several mayors, and an essential member of New York's pugnacious press corps.” Barrett published deeply critical books about Rudy Giuliani (Grand Illusion, 2006) and

The BBC rounds up the global media’s reaction to President Trump’s positive COVID-19 test. In a story filed at 4:10 AM EST today, Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer ponder “Now What?” In David Remnick’s report on the news, the New Yorker editor chooses his words carefully: “In the coming days, it is likely that commentators will respond to the demands of both decency and a sincere desire to wish anyone with a serious illness well and a quick recovery.” Maggie Haberman has been tweeting continuously since the news broke shortly before 1 AM, breaking and retweeting nonstop mini-scoops.

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