Viet Thanh Nguyen. Photo by BeBe Jacobs Esquire is hosting a Spy magazine online pop-up for the rest of the election season. Cofounder Kurt Andersen explained that the decision to revive the political satire magazine—whose heyday was the late ’80s and early ’90s—was based on the loss of hosts like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the closure of Gawker, at such an important time in the election cycle. “As Trump became the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, ‘SPY really needs to be rebooted.’” Two of Bernie Sanders’s senior campaign advisers
Brit Bennett Nepszabadsag, Hungary’s largest daily newspaper, was shut down last weekend in a move that its employees called a “coup.” In a statement on the paper’s website, parent company Mediaworks called the closure a business decision, but journalists say the shutdown is reprisal for publishing articles critical of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government. “Mediaworks argues that the paper has been making losses since 2007, so why did they invest in it in 2014?” deputy editor-in-chief Marton Gergely told EU Observer. “They couldn’t silence us, so they closed us down.” The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the “unusually aggressive
Heather Ann Thompson Finalists for the National Book Award were announced yesterday. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy are among the shortlisted books. The winner will be announced next month. Greg Jackson, whose short story collection Prodigals earned him a spot on the US National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list, talks to The Guardian about the critical reception of his stories, his stylistic influences, and the newfound pressure to write a novel. “It’s such
Nell Zink Endorsements for Hillary Clinton continue to roll in, the most recent coming from The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. The American Presidency Project’s tally of newspaper endorsements shows that the majority of newspapers have endorsed Clinton—Independent candidate Gary Johnson has three endorsements more than Trump, who has zero. But will this slew of historic endorsements change voters’ minds? At the New York Times, Jim Rutenberg doesn’t think so: “For all the pan-ideological dismay in America’s editorial boardrooms, a huge portion of the country just doesn’t see it the same way at all.” The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s conservative news
Nicholson Baker Poynter talks to David Fahrenthold, the Washington Post reporter whose articles on Donald Trump’s mishandling of charitable funds resulted in his foundation’s suspension and investigation by the New York attorney general. Fahrenthold credits social media with helping him find some of Trump’s misdeeds: “There was the $10,000 4-foot portrait. I only found out about it because somebody had seen I was writing about it on Twitter.” Adam Kirsch writes about the revelation that Elena Ferrante is likely the translator Anita Raja, arguing that it makes a good case for cultural appropriation in literature: “It turns out that
Arundhati Roy Meanwhile, Ferrante’s Neapolitan series will be turned into a play in London next winter. Bronwen Dickey, the author of the new book Pit Bull, talks to The Rumpus about the racism that drove the anti-pitbull movement. When Dickey asked people about their feelings on the dog breed for her book, the answers she received were often filled with underlying racism. “So many people would say … ‘Those people want them to be macho,’ ‘those people get them and just abandon them,’ ‘those people get them because they want to intimidate other people,’” said Dickey. “The tendency to justify things
Anita Raja In an article published yesterday in the New York Review of Books Daily blog (and simultaneously in publications in Italian, German, and French), the investigative reporter Claudio Gatti states that “after a months-long investigation,” he has uncovered information that strongly suggests the true identity of the mysterious Italian writer Elena Ferrante. “Far from the daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress described in Frantumaglia,” Gatti writes, “new revelations from real estate and financial records point to Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator whose German-born mother fled the Holocaust and later married a Neapolitan magistrate.” This is not the first time a
Brit Bennett. Photo by Emma Trim George R. R. Martin is releasing digitally-enhanced editions of his A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition was released by Apple’s iBooks yesterday on the twentieth anniversary of its publication, and includes “interactive character maps … detailed annotations, character journeys and timelines, family trees and and audio clips.” The rest of the series will be released over the next few months, and while the first enhanced edition includes an excerpt of the final book in the series, The Winds of Winter, Martin has yet to set a
Rabih Alameddine The parents of Trayvon Martin have signed a book deal with Random House’s One World imprint. Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin will be published in January. The book was acquired by Chris Jackson, the editor in chief of One World. “Everyone who’s been reading the manuscript is in tears by the second chapter,” Jackson told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s not just about the mournful story about losing a child, but it’s also how that moment ignited this global movement.” For the first time in over a century of publishing, The Arizona Republic is
Viet Thanh Nguyen. Photo by BeBe Jacobs Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, maps the current fight over cultural appropriation and outlines the myriad ways—acknowledging history, accepting criticism, taking responsibility—that writers can advance the argument over who gets to write about what. “If all of this seems too difficult, then you understand why people would rather fight over things like food, and why building walls may seem easier than building bridges.” The New Yorker’s David Remnick has written a paean to BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Calling the site “an entity that is hard to
Dan Slater. Photo: Sophie Herbert Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas launched his digital media project EmergingUS on Medium yesterday, aimed at a growing demographic that Vargas identifies as wanting “to see the women of Black Lives Matter next to The Bamboo Ceiling next to White people talking about diversity and inclusivity next to mixed-race people.” Vargas had originally partnered with the Los Angeles Times, but struggled to find a new host for the documentary series after the deal fell through. He hopes the project will change how digital media reports on “issues of identity, race, and immigration.” After
Claudia Rankine The New York Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The paper cites as evidence both Clinton’s political record and the nature of the 2016 election. “One candidate . . . has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway.” Roger Angell, the author of many books, writes in the New Yorker that he has voted in eighteen presidential elections (he first voted in 1944, for FDR). He then explains why his
Jay McInerney PEN America has released a new report on media censorship in China. The nearly eighty-page report found foreign journalists have had an increasingly difficult time doing their job since president Xi Jinping took office in 2012. The organization points to Chinese citizens’ wariness of being a source for foreign journalists due to increased crackdowns on and arrests of activists, writers, and others who question the party. Journalists have also found it more difficult to apply for and receive work visas, and foreign news outlets have shied away from publishing critical articles on their Chinese-language websites in order
Greg Tate Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine have been awarded MacArthur Fellowships, also known as “Genius Grants.” Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker and an epic multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, will receive the National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement. Gizmodo Media group—the company formerly known as Gawker Media—has named Raju Narisetti as its new CEO. Narisetti, who is currently a senior vice-president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., will begin his new gig in October. Publishers Weekly reports some bleak book-sales numbers: The first quarter of 2016 saw a 10 percent drop in print-book sales and a 19 percent
Eduardo Galeano Kirkus has announced the finalists for its annual book award, who include Annie Proulx, Colson Whitehead, C. E. Morgan, and others. The three winners—each of whom will receive a $50,000 prize—will be announced on November 3. Cave Canem, the group dedicated to furthering the work of African American poets, was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award. The $10,000 prize “for service to the American literary community” is being awarded to an organization (rather than an individual) for the first time. The New York Times will partner with Jigsaw, a technology branch of Google’s parent company Alphabet,
Andrea Wulf David Marcus, formerly the co-editor of Dissent magazine and also the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of writings by Marshall Berman, has been hired to be the new Literary Editor of The Nation. Poynter reports that the Dallas Morning News’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton may have cost the paper subscribers. “We write our editorials based on principle, and sometimes principle comes at a cost,” news editor Mike Wilson said. Last week, Donald Trump supporters demonstrated in front of the newspaper’s office to protest the endorsement. Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature has won the Royal Society Insight Investment
Joseph Kahn Wired examines The Bestseller Code, a book written by English Ph.D Jodie Archer and Stanford Literary Lab co-founder Matthew L. Jockers, based on their computer algorithm that can predict whether or not a book will be a bestseller with 80 percent accuracy. Key features of bestsellers, according to the program, include “young, strong heroines who are also misfits. … No sex, just ‘human closeness.’ Frequent use of the verb ‘need.’ Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh.” The 2016 Online Journalism Awards were announced this weekend at the Online News Association
The National Book Awards Rafia Zakaria weighs in on the hypocrisy of terrorism reporting. Comparing the coverage of Dylan Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine people in a church and has been dubbed a “domestic terrorist”—a meaningless designation under US law—to reporting on attacks by muslims, Zakaria writes: “Journalists are deeply committed to the First Amendment freedoms that permit them to do their jobs. Yet they have failed to explore how First Amendment protections are being disparately applied, exacerbating the threat posed by one group and underplaying another.” The paper is the first in a series of three
Suki Kim The National Book Association has chosen the finalists for its nonfiction award, including Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, among others. After meeting with a small group of writers over drinks at a conference this weekend, author Suki Kim was shocked to find her comments quoted in the New York Times. Rod Nordland’s article on Lionel Shriver’s controversial keynote