Political commentator Michael Brooks has died at the age of thirty-seven. As the host of The Michael Brooks Show on YouTube, he was known for his comedy, empathy, and sharp political analysis. On Twitter, the tributes have been pouring in. At Jacobin, Bhaskar Sunkara remembers his colleague and friend: “[A] dream of a vibrant community nurturing left media was fundamental to Michael’s work. Not because he aspired to be an ‘influencer’ with a large individual platform, but because he knew how important it was to build the kind of bonds that you can’t have political action without.”

In the New

Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and many others are paying tribute to John Lewis, the Civil Rights leader and Georgia congressman who died on Friday. On Twitter, political correspondent Alex Burns calls attention to a passage from David Halberstam’s The Children, in which one subject interviewed states that Lewis’s words “might have well been carved in granite.” “That young man is pure of heart.” Here is a video in which a deeply moved Lewis accepts the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2016 for the graphic memoir March. “This is unreal. This is unbelievable. As some

The Literary Arts Emergency Fund will provide $3.5 million in one-time grants to publishers and literary organizations. The fund is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was spearheaded by the Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the National Book Foundation.

At ProPublica, an investigation into Facebook’s claim that they do not allow misinformation about voting on the site: “False claims, including conspiracy theories about stolen elections or outright misrepresentations about voting by mail by Trump and prominent conservative outlets,

At Electric Lit, Eva Rosen offers a reading list of books on housing inequality. Rosen, author of The Voucher Promise, notes that this form of discrimination is pervasive in America and has many consequences: “Housing drives all sorts of disparities in the U.S.: health, wealth, education, employment, exposure to the criminal justice system, even happiness. Yet, where we live is no accident: It is the result of decades of laws, policies, practices that inscribed the blueprint for racial and social inequality across the nation.”

Novelist and editor Rakesh Satyal has been named executive editor

Andrew Sullivan is resigning from New York magazine. Bari Weiss has resigned from the New York Times. Weiss’s letter calling it quits, in which she cites bullying at the paper and an “illiberal environment,” was approvingly shared by Donald Trump Jr., Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Ted Cruz, among others.

The backlash to Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller White Fragility continues, with new ciritques by Daniel Bergner and John McWhorter.

The head of the National Book Foundation, Lisa Lucas, is joining Penguin Random House as senior vice president and publisher of Pantheon and Schocken

Namwali Serpell looks at photographer Ming Smith’s portraits of Afrofuturist poet and musician Sun Ra, and the challenges of their work. “These two artists dare us to reimagine black identity—that is, human identity—from the groundless ground up, as an order of being that stutters in and out of nonbeing, that dissolves and gathers itself and others, in turn, in time. Did Sun Ra truly believe he had once been transmolecularized to Saturn? Did he really want to save black people by sending them to outer space? Was he some kind of intergalactic Marcus Garvey, who sold tickets back to Africa but

According to the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column, Donald Trump has now made more than 20,000 “false or misleading” public statements.

At the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood has written a diary about living with and through the coronavirus: “When I examined my history, I found the following search: insane after coronavirus? coronavirus made me insane? This can’t be entirely blamed on the illness. A few years earlier I had indulged in a similar query: insane after book deal? book deal made me insane? Other search strings of interest were: ‘Christy Turlington,’ ‘the balkans,’

The Columbia Journalism Review is hosting a series of discussions with Black journalists about systemic racism in newsrooms. One of the participants, Wesley Lowery, observes, “there’s been a noticeable uptick in ‘Hey—could you give this a glance?’ notes that we’ve gotten from colleagues in recent weeks. And, to be clear, almost every black reporter I’ve ever encountered is eager and happy to help, but . . . there is very little appreciation of the real labor involved in being every person in the newsroom’s ‘black friend.'”

Austin Channing Brown talks about her memoir, I’m Still Here: Black

Discourse about The Letter published by Harper’s Magazine has been fast and furious. Gabrielle Bellot provides some much-needed context and perspective.

The New York Times Magazine has a special fiction issue inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century classic, The Decameron. In her introduction, Rivka Galchen notes the parallels between Boccaccio’s plague-ruined era and our own: “Boccaccio writes that during the Black Death the people of Florence stopped mourning or weeping over the dead. After some days away, the young storytellers of his tale are finally able to cry, nominally over

Nan A. Talese is retiring later this year after a six-decade career in publishing. Talese first started working in the literary world in 1959, as a copy editor at Random House—later becoming the publisher’s first woman literary editor—and has worked at numerous houses since, founding her own imprint at Doubleday in 1990. Margaret Atwood, whose The Handmaid’s Tale was acquired by Talese, said of her longtime collaborator and friend: “No editor has seen so many changes and done so much in publishing as the legendary and much beloved Nan Talese, known fondly to some as ‘the Nanster.’ . . . I can’t

At Forbes, Janice Gassam rounds up black businesses to support today for Blackout Day 2020. During the blackout, you can use Gassam’s list to purchase wine, kettle corn, coffee, clothes, and, of course, books: The list includes Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, a literacy center and store focused on celebrating marginalized voices.

Nick Estes writes about the role disease has played in the mass killing of Indigenous people in the US, challenging the popular consuseus that the deaths were the result of “invisible, chance forces” such as old-world microbes that Indigenous people were not

At The Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist—reflects on what the Fourth of July meant in 1776 and what it means now: “As we know all too well today, wealthy white American men did not stop rebelling when they won the American Revolution, when they gained the power to protect their declared independence. They continued to rebel to keep their power. They, ‘the Patriots.’ The rest of us have continued our rebellions because we have yet to gain the power to be free. The resisting rest of