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

NPR interviews Washington Post writer Margaret Sullivan about the decline of local news. Her new book, Ghosting the News, considers how a lack of regional journalism harms democracy.

At The Atlantic, Mychal Denzel Smith—author of the forthcoming Stakes Is High—makes the case for why police reform is not enough and “Incremental Change Is a Moral Failure.” Smith writes, “I am incensed by the delusion, so prevalent among the country’s supposedly serious thinkers, that tinkering around the edges of an inherently oppressive institution will lead to freedom.”

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of

New York City novelist and reporter Pete Hamill has died at the age of eighty-five. The Brooklyn-born author was a longtime newspaper columnist and the author of numerous books, including nonfiction titles such as A Drinking Life, Why Sinatra Matters, and Downtown: My Manhattan; as well as more than a dozen novels. When asked about his favorite city, Hamill stressed its vastness, which inspired him for more than six decades: “There’s no one New York. There’s multiple New Yorks. Anybody who sits and says ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates will guest edit the September

The Cut profiles The 19th*, a new nonprofit news organization that launched this weekend. The publication’s name references the Nineteenth Amendment, with the asterisk signifying that the right to vote was, in practice, mostly granted to white women. The site will focus on deeply reported features on politics and inequality, highlighting the stories of women who are traditionally underserved by the mainstream media.

On August 5th at 8 PM EST, Kimberlé Crenshaw, N. K. Jemisin, and Saidiya Hartman will be present a panel discussion, “Storytelling While Black and Female: Conjuring Beautiful

John Homans, frequently referred to as “a writer’s editor,” has died. A number of people who worked with him at New York magazine and Vanity Fair have paid tribute. Writes Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine: “He’s the last of a breed, a vision-quest editor: He gave you a mandate when you were going to write a story, in this sort of oracular style that was hard to describe, to motivate you. He would often say, when I was at my low ebb—tired, depressed, demoralized, as we can all get sometimes—he’d say, oh, this is the sport of kings,

John Lewis’s staff has provided the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with an essay he wanted published on the day of his funeral. “Democracy is not a state,” he wrote. “It is an act.”

At the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan considers Trump’s praise of Stella Immanuel—the Houston doctor spreading COVID-19 falsehoods on Facebook and Twitter—and a new Pew research study showing that Americans who get their news primarily from social media are more misinformed than those who rely on print or other sources.

Numerous literary agents have signed a letter in protest of how attendance cancelations

The New York Times has a report on Black book clubs. Noname, the rapper and producer, started a reading group last August that now has almost 10,000 subscribers on Patreon. She told the Times, “I think when you start questioning systems, it helps you to open up other parts of your humanity.”

In the New York Review of Books, Jonathan Freedland considers the state of fake news, disinformation, hacking, trolling, and political warfare in the era of COVID-19. Writing of the 2016 attacks on the US presidential election—and the inevitable ones coming this November—Freedland notes that disinformation

The longlist for the 2020 Booker Prize has been announced. Hilary Mantel, who won the prize for each of the first two volumes of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, has also been nominated for the third volume, The Mirror & the Light. (No author has even won the Booker Prize three times.) Other nominees include Kiley Reid for Such a Fun Age, Brandon Taylor for Real Life, Anne Tyler for Redhead by the Side of the Road, and Maaza Mengiste for The Shadow King.

At Columbia Journalism Review, Susana Ferreira writes about how the global pandemic has become a personal crisis for many journalists.

Annette

Poet and essayist Clint Smith will start as a staff writer for The Atlantic in September.

Following the recent repeal of a New York state law regarding the secrecy of police disciplinary records, ProPublica has launched a new searchable database of civilian complaints against NYPD officers. The records document misconduct allegations against 3,996 active-duty officers, spanning from September 1985 to January 2020.

The former staff of Deadspin, who quit last year in protest of a “stick to sports” mandate from the site’s bosses, have started a new company, Defector Media. They will begin with

New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick announced in a staff memo that the magazine has hired Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor as a contributing writer and Sheldon Pearce as a music writer. Taylor, who is a professor in the department of African American studies at Princeton and the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), has been writing for the New Yorker about “COVID and its devastating effects on Black communities and the quest to transform America.” Pearce has been a contributing editor at Pitchfork,