At Longreads, Tobias Carroll talks to Sarah Moss about borders, Brexit, and her new book, Ghost Wall. “There was a lot of very angry public discourse about walls and boundaries,” she said of the time when she began writing her novel. “Who are the barbarians, and who are the civilized people? Who’s in, and who’s out? Who’s English, and who’s not English? Who’s British, and who’s not British? National myths of origin were very much in my mind while I was there.”
Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man, Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck, and Lauren Groff’s Florida have been nominated for LitHub’s 2018 Story Prize. The winner will be announced in March.
Journalist Sebastian Modak has been chosen as the New York Times’s 2019 “52 Places Traveler.”
Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber is leaving the website after nearly twenty-five years. Schreiber had left his role as editor in chief last year but stayed on with the company. “It’s an interesting sensation,” Schreiber told the Los Angeles Times. “I feel at peace with it. As much as it’s been part of my entire adult life and as much fun as I’ve had, I feel like I want to keep pushing boundaries and exploring new things.”
Refinery29’s editorial staff is unionizing with the Writers Guild of America East. We are proud of working at an outlet that believes in encouraging women to challenge the status quo, in their lives and in the world. We believe that unionizing is the best way, and the feminist answer, to address our workplace issues,” the group explained in a statement. “This way we’ll be able to continue publishing stories and creating content that serve as a catalyst for women to see, feel, and claim their power.”
Hmm Daily’s Tom Scocca looks at the media’s attempts at fact-checking Trump’s recent televised speech about immigration and the federal government shutdown. “Third-party fact-checking, as the establishment press does it, is the opposite of providing context. It is a process of breaking things apart . . . till they lose their meaning,” he writes. “It purports to be an endpoint or resolution, but the fact-checks become more facts, hastily and indifferently reported ones, to be fed back into the news cycle and misused or misrepresented. Everybody gets Pinocchios; nothing gets to be real.”