In their annual state of the media column, Mother Jones examines “the toxic combination of Facebook’s anti-democratic effect, Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidency, and the rise of a bolder class of propagandists,” which they write “is the story that in many ways defined this year, and will probably define the next two years too.”
At Columbia Journalism Review, Jack Crosbie looks at the Charle Koch Institute’s Media and Journalism Fellowship, part of the Koch family’s attempt to rebrand “as a friend of the Fourth Estate.”
In her “By the Book” interview, Michelle Obama discusses the Obama family book club, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and her unlikely childhood hero, Pippi Longstocking.
LitHub talks to Meghan O’Rourke, who was recently named editor of the Yale Review.
Josephine Livingstone talks to Tavi Gevinson about her decision to close her website, Rookie.
The Guardian’s Laura Waddell considers the pros and cons of tow recently-announced literary sequels. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as a dissection of authoritarian attitudes to women’s freedom, has never felt more relevant in the era of Trump,” she writes approvingly. But Waddell feels that André Aciman’s sequel to Call Me By Your Name might detract from the original. “It seems a shame to take a work that is a masterclass in nostalgia and repackage it as the first instalment of an ongoing story,” she explains. “Letting the reader glimpse adults who have never forgotten one another at the end of the first book perfectly captures the sense of life passing, special people left lingering in the heart ever after.”