Michelle Dean. Photo: John Midgely On his return to the US from a vacation with his family, columnist Shaun King was detained at JFK Airport and questioned about his involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement. The Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts Jr writes that “one is hard-pressed to explain what happened Monday as anything other than a clumsy attempt at political intimidation, the government’s unsubtle way of letting a critic know that Big Brother is watching.” Matthew Lacombe discusses his research on NRA editorials in American Rifleman magazine and how they’ve impacted gun owners’ views on gun laws. Splinter’s

Mark Zuckerberg Yesterday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified before congress. As The Ringer writes, he’s very sorry for the company’s recent missteps and misdeeds, including the improper sharing of personal data with Cambridge Analytica. He’ll be back testifying today. The Atlantic points out the thirteen strangest moments from the first day of hearings, while at the New Yorker, Adrian Chen considers what was missing from Zuckerberg’s remarks: “Facebook’s business model and leadership structure are still there. The company is still, as Tim Wu recently pointed out in the Times, a machine for ‘maximizing the harvest of data and human attention.’” 

Lorrie Moore The family of Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin has filed a war crimes case against the Syrian government. The suit claims that in 2012, Colvin, alongside photographer Rémi Ochlik “was assassinated by government forces of the Syrian Arab Republic as she reported on the suffering of civilians.” The Intercept looks into the evidence submitted with the lawsuit, including a video of her final moments and “nearly 2,000 pages of documents” that “provide detailed and unprecedented evidence to support the claim that Colvin was deliberately hunted and killed as part of a policy by the Assad regime to

Tom Wolfe This week, New York Magazine is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. To celebrate, it’s running an oral history, with quotes from editors and contributors, including Tom Wolfe, Gloriam Steinem, Gail Sheehy, Michael Wolff, and Frank Rich. In the first issue, which came out on April 8, 1968, Tom Wolfe wrote about accents and status, and Arthur C. Clarke wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. William T. Vollmann’s new books about nuclear- and carbon-based fuels should “scare the hell out of you.” Amazon’s TV adaptation of the Lord of the Rings could wind up costing more than

Emily Nemens. Photo: Jeremiah Ariaz The Paris Review has chosen Emily Nemens as its new editor. Nemens was most recently the co-editor of the Southern Review. “Her literary tastes, her accomplishments, the combination of her work ethic and her sense of collaboration—both with her writers and her staff—make her a really unique package of talent,” one board member told the New York Times. “This is someone who is on a steep trajectory, and The Paris Review is going to benefit from that.” The Atlantic has fired columnist Kevin Williamson “after it became apparent that his belief that women who

Sloane Crosley The Man Booker International prize has reversed its decision to change Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi’s nationality from Taiwan to “Taiwan, China.” Wu, whose novel The Stolen Bicycle is on the longlist for the prize, was previously listed as being from Taiwan, but The Guardian reports that “following a complaint from the Chinese embassy in London last week, his nationality was changed on the prize’s website.” Look Alive Out There author Sloane Crosley talks to Hazlitt about how living in New York affects her writing. “I grew up in White Plains, which is a commuter town thirty minutes

Kevin Young The city of New York has announced another round of its One Book, One New York program. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican are all in the running, with the winner to be announced in May. The winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have been announced. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing won the fiction category, while Kevin Young’s Bunk has won the nonfiction prize.  So Many Olympic Exertions author Annelise Chen says that she’s |https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/autofiction-and-the-asian-diaspora-a-q-and-a-with-anelise-chen/#!|noticed|

Viv Albertine. Photo: Michael Putland Slits guitarist and memoirist Viv Albertine talks to The Guardian about her childhood, female rage, and her new book, To Throw Away Unopened. Albertine says that her newest book “is essentially about rage and being an outsider.” “Female rage is not often acknowledged—never mind written about—so one of the questions I’m asking is: ‘Are you allowed to be this angry as you grow older as a woman?’ But I’m also trying to trace where my anger came from,” she explained. “Who made me the person that is still so raw and angry? I think

Anita Shreve Novelist Anita Shreve has died at age seventy-one. Her 1997 novel, The Weight of Water, was a bestseller, and in 1998 Oprah Winfrey chose Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife for her book club. “She wrote beautifully melodic and nuanced prose. I admired every book of hers,” her publisher, Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group, told the Boston Globe. “She brought a great mind to the observation of emotions.” The Guardian has assembled an ambitious list of “fifty writers you should read now,” covering not only “fiction,” “politics,” and “memoir,” but also “science and nature.” Quijote Talks has

Jeffrey Eugenides Employees of the AV Club, The Onion, and Clickhole have formed a union. Onion Inc. staffers join Gizmodo Media Group, Vice, and more in unionizing under the Writers Guild of America, East. The New York Times has released a report on the diversity of its staff. The company plans to publish a report on the gender and ethnic diversity of its staff annually. The Ecuadorian Embassy in London has cut off Julian Assange’s internet access due to his violation of “an agreement he signed with his hosts at the end of 2017 not to use his communiques

Liu Cixin Members of the Folio Academy are calling on the Man Booker organization to stop including American writers in the competition. 2005 Booker winner John Banville said that while he had been in favor of the 2014 rule change, he now has a different opinion. “The prize was unique in its original form, but has lost that uniqueness. It is now just another prize among prizes,” he explained. “I am convinced the administrators should take the bold step of conceding the change was wrong, and revert.” Amazon is reportedly spending $1 billion develop Liu Cixin’s sci-fi book series

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Dorothy Hong Daniel Heath Justice implores young indigenous writers to be persistent and trust their instincts. “Too often we’ve been told that our words don’t matter. Too often we’ve been told that Indigenous people are unworthy of consideration as writers,” he writes. “Your work is the inscribed embodiment of the survival and struggle of generations, the realization of possibility that’s so different from what so many of our ancestors had to face.” The New York Times looks at the ways in which publishers have reacted to sexual misconduct claims against their authors. Going Clear director Alex

Ian Buruma The New York Review of Books collects scenes from the March for Our Lives in New York and Washington, DC. Lucy Jakub writes that the capital’s march was “by turns high school variety show, pop concert, and memorial tribute,” and didn’t involve much marching. “At the D.C. Women’s March in 2017, the rally was effectively invisible and inaudible to most of the crowd, which was antsy to go somewhere and yell at somebody,” she writes. “The organizers of the March for Our Lives knew that what the people want now, above all, are the kids. We came

Lauren Cerand Literary publicist Lauren Cerand is joining the staff of the journal A Public Space, where she will act as Marketing and Development Director. Tomorrow at the Brooklyn Public Library, authors Porochista Khakpour, Idra Novey, and John Freeman will discuss Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, whose The Chandelier has just been published in English for the first time (in a translation by Benjamin Moser). Also tomorrow: Two amazing novelists, Lynne Tillman and Colm Toibin, will appear at McNally Jackson to discuss Tillman’s new book, Men and Apparitions. At Splinter, Paul Blest revisits some of the opinions expressed by Kevin

Carmen Maria Machado. Photo: Tom Storm The Atlantic has hired four new columnists for its soon to be launched ideas, opinions, and commentary section. In this new feature of the website, Ibram X. Kendi, Kevin D. Williamson, Annie Lowrey, and Alex Wagner “will help readers understand the key issues of the day, introduce novel evidence and reporting to the debate, and shape the public conversation.” New York magazine has bought Splitsider, the Awl Network’s comedy website. The site’s archives will stay online and its URL will now redirect to Vulture. Tracy K. Smith will continue in her role as

Esmé Weijun Wang. Photo: Kristin Cofer The 2018 Whiting Award winners have been announced. Tommy Pico, Weike Wang, Anne Boyer, Brontez Purnell, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Esmé Weijun Wang, Rickey Laurentiis, Nathan Alan Davis, Hansol Jung, and Antoinette Nwandu will all receive $50,000. Penguin has acquired a memoir by late style photographer Bill Cunningham. The manuscript was found by Cunningham’s family after his death in 2016. Fashion Climbing details Cunningham’s childhood in Boston and his life in New York. The book will be published in September and includes a preface by New Yorker writer Hilton Als. New York Magazine has

Tracy K. Smith. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths The shortlist for the Wellcome book prize has been announced. Nominees include Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s Stay with Me, Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind, and Sigrid Rausing’s Mayhem. The winner will be revealed next month. Les Payne, former Newsday editor and founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, has died. Google is launching a campaign to “support the media industry by fighting misinformation and bolstering journalism.” Over three years, the Google News Initiative will invest $300 million into supporting news organizations, creating new tools for journalists, and promoting accurate reporting

Leslie Jamison At the Paris Review, Chris Kraus and Leslie Jamison discuss recovery, addiction narratives, and Jamison’s latest book, The Recovering. “So much of the book is a fight against exceptionalism,” Jamison said. “The idea that a story has to be ‘exceptional’ in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person’s story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn’t hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing, only a sense of curiosity and offering?” Broadway show Dear Evan

Samantha Hunt The board of the Paris Review is considering eight candidates, all of them women, to become editor of the literary journal. Boris Kachka reports on the hiring process. “Board members tapped the candidates one by one, like pledges to an exclusive club. They were asked to submit memos and then summoned for 45-minute sessions in the riverside townhouse. The search committee, which includes novelists Mona Simpson and Jeffrey Eugenides, presented fairly conventional questions (e.g., which Review story they liked best, and why)—without revealing what they’re actually looking for.” Guyanese author Wilson Harris—whose innovative novels considered colonialism and

Sloane Crosley The National Book Foundation has announced the judges for the 2018 National Book Awards. The longlist for the prize will be revealed in September. Michael Caine is writing a new memoir. Blowing the Bloody Doors Off—And Other Lessons in Life will be published by Hachette books and does not yet have a publication date. The Guardian reflects on the end of British music magazine NME, which published its last print copy this month. Axios reports that Meredith Corp. is selling several titles that it recently acquired in its purchase of Time Inc, including Time, Fortune, Money, and