The New York Review of Books has released its election issue. The magazine features dispatches and essays from Vivian Gornick, Hari Kunzru, Jacqueline Rose, Darryl Pinckney, and many more. Rose writes in her standout piece, “The Pleasures of Authoritarianism”: No point . . . asking how bad it can get, how far they are willing to go, or how on earth they can get away with it all. Going too far is the point. The transgression is the draw and the appeal.”
A look at Barry Jenkins’s adaption of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.
At the Paris Review Daily, Joy Williams offers an appreciation of William Gaddis’s JR. Writing about that novel and Gaddis’s first, The Recognitions, Williams observes: “In each case the invalid miraculously arose and, with commanding vigor, transformed and transforming, entered the realm of great literature.”
Axios reports that last week’s front-page New York Post story on Hunter Biden drew more than double the interactions generated by top articles on Trump or Joe Biden. Crackdowns from Twitter and Facebook, meant to control the story’s spread, which the tabloid published despite reliability and authenticity concerns, “may have inadvertently brought it even more attention.”
Tickets are available for a webinar next Friday, October 30, hosted by Lola Olufemi at the Feminist Library. Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, will discuss her new book and the library’s exhibition on the history of Black women’s crucial role in social movements.