Grant author Ron Chernow will headline the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner next year. “Freedom of the press is always a timely subject and this seems like the perfect moment to go back to basics,” Chernow said in a statement. “While I have never been mistaken for a stand-up comedian, I promise that my history lesson won’t be dry.”
Former White House aide and Trump campaign staffer Cliff Sims is writing a book about the Trump administration. Team of Vipers, which reportedly received a seven-figure advance from publisher Thomas Dunne Books, will be available in January.
New York Times Paris bureau chief Alissa J. Rubin will take over the paper’s Baghdad bureau for six months.
In her first column for New York magazine, Jill Abramson looks at how the Republican party is attempting to exploit the #MeToo movement for its own benefit.
At LitHub, Alethea Black, Esme Weijun Wang, Michele Lent Hirsch, Sonya Huber, Julie Rehmeyer, and Abby Norman discuss the process of writing women’s pain. “I think pain can be as ineffable and mysterious and internal as love,” Black said. “How to let someone else know what this sensation is like when I don’t fully understand it myself? How to make concrete what is so abstract—yet simultaneously concrete?”
“He was an ambassador from the ‘silent generation,’ whose young men harbored dreams of writing the Great American Novel, to the ‘film generation,’ which wrote the mythology of the New Hollywood,” writes A. O. Scott in his remembrance of novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, who died last week at the age of eighty-seven. “His insider-outsider books at once affirmed and debunked the myths, skewering movie-industry hypocrisy, venality and pretension even as they celebrated the hard work, scrappy creativity and helter-skelter deal making that allowed the movies to flourish. His skepticism stopped short of cynicism, and he never seemed to stop having fun.”