Maggie Nelson. Photo: Tom Atwood Noah Baumbach is adapting Don DeLillo’s White Noise for the screen. The film is said to star Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver. At Entertainment Weekly, Seija Rankin has a short QA with Maggie Nelson about her new book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. When asked what the first thing she remembers writing was, Nelson replied: “A fourth-grade report called ‘Cats Galore!’ I still have fond feelings toward the word galore.” Editors at the New York Post have instructed staff not to use the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, or the Washington

Wesley Lowery. Photo: Reggie Cunningham Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist on criminal justice and author of They Can’t Kill Us All, is joining the Marshall Project. As a contributing editor, he will help the organization expand into local reporting. At n+1, Vincent Bevins writes about the confused comparisons used by politicians, brands, and entertainers “randomly grasping for imagery from the bad, brown world beyond our borders” to describe the attempted coup at the capitol last week. George W. Bush, for example, likened the events of January 6 to how election results “are disputed in a banana republic,” eliding the

Brendan O’Connor. Photo: Tayarisha Poe The London Review of Books has put together a collection of pieces from the paper on “How (not) to stage a coup,” featuring work by Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens, Patricia Beer, and more. The Story Prize, sponsored by the Chisholm Foundation, has announced its finalists for the year: Danielle Evans, Deesha Philyaw, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. A group of NPR stations has sent a letter criticizing the New York Times, producer Andy Mills, and host Michael Barbaro for their handling of the Caliphate podcast controversy. (One of the central figures of that show was

Pauline Harmange Photo: Magali Delporte Ved Mehta, a writer for the New Yorker for thirty years, has died. Mehta’s books include Walking the Indian Streets, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, and twelve volumes of memoir collectively titled Continents of Exile. “Ved Mehta has established himself as one of the magazine’s most imposing figures,” New Yorker editor William Shawn told the New York Times in 1982. In August, Pauline Harmange’s debut book I Hate Men was published in a run of four hundred copies by the nonprofit French press Monstrograph. An employee of France’s ministry for gender equality, Ralph Zurmély,

Patrick M. Shanahan with Senator Josh Hawley. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States/Wikicommons At Politico and the New York Times, journalists recount their experiences inside the Capitol building when a pro-Trump mob forced entry on Wednesday. At Indian Country Today, Dalton Walker contrasts the meager use of force by Capitol police on the mob with the aggressive tactics used by the National Guard on pipeline opponents at Standing Rock in 2016. At Poynter, Katy Byron previews the year in misinformation for 2021. Needless to say, it’s not looking good, with Byron’s big three

Kathleen Belew Yesterday, as a pro-Trump mob breached barriers at the US Capitol, interal discussion boards at Facebook calling for banning Trump from the site were silenced by supervisors. One of the threads that was frozen included comments such as “Can we get some courage and actual action from leadership in response to this behavior?,” and, “We should do better.” Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook is indeed banning Trump from their platforms indefinitely. Trump has also been suspended from Twitter, and Shopify took down his online store. Masha Gessen asks why the Capitol police allowed the building to

Eric Jerome Dickey. Photo: Joseph Jones Nieman Lab has asked “some of the smartest people in journalism” for their 2021 predictions. Hanif Abdurraqib writes about his gratitude for Eric Jerome Dickey, the best-selling novelist who died yesterday at age fifty-nine. For Abdurraqib, Dickey was an inspiration not just for his output, but for his roundabout path to becoming an author: “I’m always thankful for the life he lived before that. A life where he was still a writer, no matter what else he was doing.” At Entertainment Weekly, read an excerpt of Interior Chinatown author Charles Yu’s latest work

Lindsay Peoples Wagner. Photo: Tom Newton The Cut has named Lindsay Peoples Wagner as its new editor in chief. Peoples Wagner was formerly the editor of Teen Vogue and a one-time fashion editor at The Cut. At Vulture, Lila Shapiro gives a full debrief of the American Dirt controversy, one of the biggest book stories of 2020. At the New Yorker, Hua Hsu remembers the masked wordsmith MF Doom, whose death at age forty-nine was reported this week. Hsu writes of the late rapper and producer, “He was an artist who took experiences that might have turned someone else

Fran Lebowitz. Photo: Christopher Macsurak Fran Lebowitz talks about her latest film project, Pretend It’s a City, with Martin Scorsese. New work by Lauren Groff, Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Hanif Abdurraqib, Louise Glück, Maggie Nelson, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, and many more: The Guardian has published a list of books and literary events to “look forward to this year.” Bozoma Saint John, the global chief marketing officer for Netflix, has sold a memoir, The Urgent Life, to Viking. The latest episode of the Slate Money podcast features an interview with Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of

Claire Messud The hedge fund Alden Global is looking to buy national newspaper chain Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Daily News, and other papers. Alden is currently Tribune’s largest shareholder and, as the Wall Street Journal notes, “A deal would have far-reaching implications for an industry beset by sharp declines in revenue over the past 20 years that have led to a wave of consolidation and cost cuts.” Tribune has laid off reporters and shut down newsrooms in 2020 as well sold off its e-commerce business. At the New York Times, John Williams

Candacy Taylor. Photo: Katrina Parks, Assertion Films At the New York Review of Books, Salamishah Tillet interviews painter Jordan Casteel about her large-scale oil portraits and the importance of scale in her work: “I was thinking about the way that Black male bodies have existed in the visual and historical realms in the Americas, and how they’ve been villainized, made to feel small, disrespected. I just wanted to give them as much room as possible.” Scott Donaldson, biographer of Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, has died at the age of ninety-two. He also wrote a book

Barry Lopez. Photo: David Liittschwager Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist working in China, has been sentenced to four years in prison for COVID reporting that challenged the government and contradicted the official account of the outbreak in Wuhan. At the New Republic, Alexander Chee reviews two novels that imagine a post-internet future: Don Delillo’s The Silence and Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest. Chee writes, “Both feel like revenge fantasies on social media and electronic connectedness. They arrive not so much as oracles as scolds. They may not offer a guide to the future, but to the present.” The Intercept reports

Kiese Laymon. Simon Schuster The Committee to Protect Journalists has issued a demand that Cuban authorities stop harassing reporter Carlos Manuel Álvarez, who is the director of the Cuban online literary journalism magazine El Estornudo, a contributor to El País, and the author of the novel The Fallen, which was released in English translation by Graywolf in June. Over the past month, Álvarez has been detained, held under house arrest, and assaulted by security agents, all in retribution for his support of the San Isidro movement in Cuba. Writer Barry Lopez has died. His books include the National Book

Marty Baron At Vanity Fair, a report on Marty Baron’s impending retirement. Baron has been editor of the Washington Post since 2012. Sources at the paper expect him to step down in the coming year, but not before staffers return to the office. The Kansas City Star has published a lengthy apology for the paper’s history, writing that the publication has “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.” Conversations within the newsroom led the paper to take a hard look at the ways in which the Black community has been covered in the paper, dating back to

Roxane Gay The New York Times reports on an international scam that is tricking writers, editors, and agents into sending their unpublished manuscripts. So far, it is unclear what the scammers are doing with the drafts. Catherine Eccles, the owner of a literary talent agency in London, told the Times: “They know who our clients are, they know how we interact with our clients, where sub-agents fit in and where primary agents fit in. They’re very, very good.” The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is offering a Proust-themed gift card. Courses in early 2021 include an introduction to Frantz

Wole Soyinka. Photo: Penguin Random House Pantheon has announced that it will publish a new book by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, his first novel in forty-eight years. Set in an “imaginary Nigeria,” Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, which will be released on September 28, 2021, is “at once a savagely witty whodunit and a corrosively satirical examination of corruption, both personal and political.” In an opinion piece at the New York Times, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong (author of, most recently, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning) writes about right-wing conspiracy theories that

Thulani Davis. Photo: University of Wisconsin-Madison Authors and critics, including Nadia Owusu, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Ayad Akhtar, share their year in reading at The Millions. Takashi Oka, former Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times and representative in Washington of Japan’s Liberal Party, has died at the age of ninety-six. At the New York Review of Books, Batya Ungar-Sargon looks back at Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, the country’s first penny press, and popular journalism’s blue-collar origins: “More than promoting any particular ideology, the penny press made visible New Yorkers who weren’t people of means. Rather than

Nikki Giovanni At the New York Times, a profile of Nikki Giovanni, the poet, children’s book author, and nonfiction writer with over thirty books to her credit. Looking back at her career, Giovanni says, “I thought 50 years ago that I could make a big difference in the world. What I know now is that I will not allow the world to make a big difference in me. That’s what’s incredibly important. I’m not going to let the fact that I live in a nation with a bunch of fools make a fool out of me.” At the New

Maria Tumarkin. Photo: Transit Books In a raft of high-level promotions and restructuring at Condé Nast, Anna Wintour has been given two new titles: global editorial director of Vogue and worldwide chief content officer. As New York Times media reporter Edmund Lee notes, Wintour will now have “final say over publications in more than 30 markets around the world.” The University of Mississippi has fired Garrett Felber, a tenure-track assistant professor and vocal scholar of Malcolm X, the American carceral state, and anti-racism, citing poor communication. In October, Felber took to Twitter to describe how the university rejected a

Elizabeth Hinton Editor Gerald Howard looks back on the glory days of the American trade paperback. Howard worked at Penguin Books in the 1980s, when a productive rivalry with Vintage spurred a contemporary fiction boom: “There was a lot of fun to be had in publishing in those years by being ‘Contemporary.’ It was definitely a moment and people who worked in trade paperback in those years remember it fondly.” At the Associated Press, Hillel Italie recaps a tumultuous year in publishing. As Simon Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp puts it: “A lot of what has happened this year—if it