At the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz remembers her time studying poetry under Yale Review editor J. D. McClatchy, who died earlier this week at the age of 72. Schwartz writes that McClatchy “was a towering, booming presence, commanding, elegant, initially fearsome, later endearing, witty, sharp, amused. He broke his favorite poems down for us, exposing their layers and devices, revealing to us his own admiration for their art.”

The 2018 Man Booker International Prize shortlist has been announced. Nominees include previous winners Han Kang and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, as well as Virginie Despentes,

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 Hamilton

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

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

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 $1

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 get an abortion should be hanged was

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 outside of

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 |

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 that it’s empowering to ask that question.”

The New York Times looks

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

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 to interfere in the affairs of other states.”

Danielle

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 The Three-Body Problem