Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill has sold a book to Algonquin. Off the Edge: Flat Earth, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything will be “a deeply reported narrative” about the Flat Earth movement “that is part internet anthropology and part intervention.”
Hmm Daily will stop publishing new articles next month. Editor Tom Scocca, who is joining Slate as the website’s politics editor, will continue writing the Hmm Weekly newsletter.
“If $4 a word makes you a queen, does that make the rest of us serfs? And why are the serfs mostly, like, LGBTQ writers, people of color, and women in independent publishing?” asks Soraya Roberts in a Longreads essay on pay inequality, feminism, and how the myth of meritocracy affects writers. “Distressingly, some women seem to have bought into the idea that they make a lot less than certain writers because they are way less talented and hardworking, but I’m finding it hard to believe that so many marginalized writers are less talented and hardworking than so many white people.”
At Literary Hub, Chavisa Woods reflects on writing her new memoir, 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism). “This book was not pleasant to write. It was not healing. It was re-traumatizing. I would not suggest that anyone do this as a therapeutic exercise,” she writes. “At points, I thought about stopping. But I didn’t, because I believe in the power of narrative, and also, because I no longer know what else to do.”
Emily Nussbaum talks to Entertainment Weekly about her new essay collection, I Like to Watch. “It’s about detaching television from the status anxiety that haunted it in its early decades, when people thought of it as garbage and junk and something shameful—which to my mind has been a hangover even as television has gotten closer to the center of the culture, has gotten increasingly aesthetically ambitious,” she said. “There’s a level at which it was still somewhat burdened by this sense that in order to praise TV, you had to compare it to other more elevated art forms. ‘It’s novelistic!’ Some TV shows are novelistic, but being novelistic doesn’t make it a better TV show.”