The 2019 Wellcome Prize longlist has been announced. Nominees include Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The winner announced in May.
PEN America has announced the winners of this year’s nomination-based literary awards. Honorees, including Sandra Cisneros and Larissa Fasthorse among others, will receive their prizes at a ceremony later this month.
Netflix has ordered a series based on Karin Slaughter’s 2018 crime novel, Pieces of Her.
At LitHub, Bowlaway author Elizabeth McCracken considers the doughnut. “Like most works of art, doughnuts are defined by an absence,” she writes. “They are modest and hollow. They belong to anyone.”
After a New Yorker profile accused author and editor Dan Mallory “of a long history of falsehoods around his professional history and health,” The Woman in the Window author has admitted that he lied about his brain cancer diagnosis, The Guardian reports. “I felt intensely ashamed of my psychological struggles – they were my scariest, most sensitive secret,” Mallory said in a statement. “I was utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew – that they’d conclude I was defective in a way that I should be able to correct, or, worse still, that they wouldn’t believe me. Dissembling seemed the easier path.”
The New York Times’s Jaclyn Peiser looks at how AI is being used by journalists at Bloomberg News. Cyborg, a company system that “is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles” helps create a third of all published work on Bloomberg News. “The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures,” Peiser explains. “And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.”