Jill Abramson. Photo: Peter Yang Atlantic Media chairman David Bradley talks about his failed purchase of the now-shuttered National Journal. Calvin Tomkins profiles Dana Schutz, the artist whose abstract oil painting of Emmett Till’s body has caused controversy at the Whitney Biennial. Howard Jacobson is still furious about Trump’s election, and encourages others to stay angry as well. “There mustn’t be a moment when we turn on the TV and think there’s Trump in the White House—that must never feel normal,” he told The Guardian. “That ‘get over it’ thing—ooh, I want to kill anybody who says get over

National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ishion Hutchinson As the New York Times points out, a number of recently published dystopian novels suddenly “seem more like grim prophecy than science fiction.” “Name a writer or publication you disagree with but still read…” Vox interviews Roxane Gay. In a review of the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, Colm Toibin celebrates the work of James Baldwin, “the finest essayist and prose-stylist of his generation.” The essay opens with an anecdote about the recently deceased New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, who, working at Harper’s in the 1960s, became concerned

Nan Talese The Believer has been sold to the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Joshua Wolf Shenk, the director of the Institute, will take over as editor. The current editors, Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida, will remain as consultants. Vida told the Associated Press that although The Believer has become more financially stable over the years, the sale will help sustain the magazine for the long term. “To persist and grow,” Vida said, “The Believer needs resources and an ambitious agenda, and Josh and the Black Mountain Institute have both.” Mary Gaitskill talks to

Rosie Gray Bob Dylan will accept his Nobel Prize after one of his previously-scheduled performances in Stockholm this weekend. In a “Good news about Dylan” blog post, Swedish Academy permanent secretary Sara Danius wrote that the Academy “will show up at one of the performances,” but that Dylan will not be giving his required lecture at the media-free, Academy-only event. Three months after leaving BuzzFeed for The Atlantic, Rosie Gray has been named as the magazine’s White House correspondent. Digiday looks at The Guardian’s US office, which was responsible for Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the National Security Agency and

Claudia Rankine Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has won the 2016 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. The $10,000 prize will be awarded to Rankine at a ceremony in April. At Artforum, Lauren O’Neill-Butler talks to the author about the Racial Imaginary Institute, which Rankine founded after winning her MacArthur “genius” grant last year. The institute is still settling on a location somewhere in New York, but Rankine hopes that it will be located somewhere more accessible than a university campus. “It would have been easier for me to bring it to an academic space,” she said. “I would

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Dorothy Hong Moonlight writer and director Barry Jenkins is developing a series for Amazon based on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The rights to Jeffrey Tayler and Nina Khruscheva’s In Putin’s Footsteps have been acquired by St. Martin’s Press. The book examines Putin’s impact on the country through snapshots of cities in each of Russia’s eleven time zones. In Putin’s Footsteps will be published in 2018. The Atlantic is opening a new office in London. National correspondent James Fallows will lead the bureau as the magazine’s first Europe editor. In a statement, Atlantic president Bob Cohn

Laura Kipnis Last week at Wellesley College, six professors sent an email to fellow faculty members, urging them to reconsider the criteria by which they select authors to speak at the college. They hoped that their request would prevent speakers such as Laura Kipnis, who appeared at Wellesley earlier this month, from being invited to speak on campus in the future. In her new book Unwanted Advances, Kipnis delivers a scathing critique of the way universities have regulated sexual conduct on campuses, particularly their use of Title IX. The six Wellesley professors argued that such arguments could be “painful

Jami Attenberg At The Guardian, John Banville remembers Robert Silvers’s editing ability and knack for matching books with reviewers. “The FedEx package would arrive, containing a volume I could not imagine wanting to read, much less review,” he writes. “Yet a few weeks later I would find myself writing three or four thousand enthusiastic words on it, and wondering why I had not taken notice of this author, or that subject, before.” At the Washington Post, Christian Caryl writes that Silvers’s death came at the worst possible time for American intellectual life. “Bob’s legacy has had a profound and

Robert Silvers. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath The remembrances of Robert Silvers continue. At the New Yorker, Louis Menand remembers his regular lunch partner of seven years. “The Review will continue, we all hope, to be a great magazine,” he writes, “but everyone knows that it cannot be the same magazine without Bob, and that the world of art and ideas will be somehow smaller without him.” Ian Buruma, a longtime writer for the magazine, talks about his first piece for the Review, Silvers’s considerate editing style, and what might happen next at the publication. At the New York Review

Elif Batuman Google has released a “Protect Your Election” toolkit ahead of the upcoming elections in France. The kit offers help with password protection, phishing warnings, and defense against denial-of-service-attacks, all of which have been used to target journalists and election officials in numerous countries. The Daily Beast’s Nico Hines reflects on his now-retracted story about hook-ups during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Hines had created accounts on Grindr and Tinder in order to report the story, and did not identify himself as a journalist. “Before writing this story, I didn’t appreciate what ‘check your privilege’ truly meant,”

Robert Silvers. Photo: Annie Schlechter Lucky Peach will close its website in May and publish its final issue this fall. USA Today has hired its first female editor in chief. Joanne Lipman, currently Gannett’s chief content officer, will take on the role immediately. The New York Times reports on the alt-right’s surprising and misguided appreciation for Jane Austen. Professor Nicole M. Wright published an article on the subject in the Chronicle of Higher Education after hearing Milo Yiannopoulos quote the first line of Pride and Prejudice. In a search of a transcript of Yiannopolous’s comments, she found many examples

Jimmy Breslin Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, died this morning at the age of eighty-seven. Silvers was a founding editor of the Review and had been its sole editor since the death of the magazine’s cofounder, Barbara Epstein, in 2006. The tributes began pouring in on Twitter almost immediately, despite the fact that Silvers tended to shy away from praise: Even as one of the most eminent and admired editors in the literary world, he avoided the spotlight. As he told an interviewer in 2008: “The editor is a middleman. The one thing he should avoid is taking credit.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Derek Walcott died this morning at the age of 87. During his decades-long career, the Nobel Prize-winning poet was honored with a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the T.S. Eliot Prize, and many other literary awards. In an interview with the Paris Review, Walcott described how his upbringing in St. Lucia influenced his writing. “My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done,” he said. “Our

Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea Kevin Young will take over for Paul Muldoon as the poetry editor of the New Yorker. Young is currently the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and will start working at the New Yorker in November, when Muldoon officially steps down. The two will also collaborate on an event at the New Yorker Festival this fall. Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, Ismail Kadare’s The Traitor’s Niche, and Amos Oz’s Judas are among the books longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. The shortlist will be announced next month, and winner

Jami Attenberg The shortlist for the 2017 Wellcome Prize has been released. Nominees include Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene, and David France’s How to Survive a Plague. The winner will be announced in April. Harvard professor Jane Kamensky has been awarded the New York Historical Society’s annual book prize for A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. She will be presented with the award as part of the society’s “Weekend in History” event in April. At The Millions, Jami Attenberg talks about the inspiration for her new novel, All Grown Up. Attenberg

Marilynne Robinson. Photo: Kelly Ruth Winter Marilynne Robinson will publish an essay collection with Virago. What Are We Doing Here? aims to figure out “how America should talk about itself now,” and will be published in 2018. Pam Colloff is leaving Texas Monthly for a joint position at the New York Times and ProPublica. Colloff will stay in Texas while she serves as a senior reporter at ProPublica, and a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza has been hired by CNN Politics as a reporter and editor at large. At the Post, Cillizza

Brit Bennett Isabel Allende is working on a new novel. The book tells the story of a car accident in Brooklyn that becomes “the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story.” In the Midst of Winter will be published by Atria next fall. Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, will be made into a film. The adaptation was bought by Warner Bros. Actress Kerry Washington will produce the movie, and Bennett will write the script. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann announced plans for a third book in their Game Change series. The next installment will cover the 2016

Masha Gessen Masha Gessen will deliver this year’s Arthur Miller Lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival, which will be followed by a conversation between the journalist and Samantha Bee. The event will be held on May 7 at Cooper Union in New York. Dan Rather will publish a book of essays. Spurred by his viral Facebook posts on the election, the president, and the state of the country, What Unites Us will collect Rather’s thoughts on “the institutions that sustain us, . . . the values that have transformed us, . . . and the drive towards science

Domenico Starnone Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are being adapted for television. The thirty-two part TV series will cover all four books and be directed by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo. Shooting will begin in Italy this year, with the show set to arrive in late 2018. There is no word yet about an American distributor for the program.  At The Week, Lili Loofbourow tells “the tangled tale of two Italian literary giants”: Ferrante and Domenico Starnone. Starnone is married to Anita Raja, the author and translator who was outed last year as the writer behind Ferrante’s books. With his new

John le Carré The finalists for the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced. At the Washington Post, Ron Charles reflects on the America represented by the nominees. “There was a time,” he writes, “when all the stars of American literature seemed to be straight white guys named John.” But this year’s finalists—Garth Greenwell, Sunil Yapa, and Imbolo Mbue, Viet Dinh, and Louise Erdrich—are “a sign of how far we’ve progressed from those monochromatic days.” Penguin Random House imprint Crown will publish the memoirs of both Barack and Michelle Obama. Crown was the likely choice for the Obamas’ next books,