Jamaica Kincaid. Photo: Sofie Sigrinn At the New York Review of Books, David Treuer looks at a recent history of the Lakota people. Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America “emphasizes that to understand American history it is vital to understand Lakota—and, by extension, Native American—history; that rather than existing in a state of constant first contact marked by incomprehension and surprise, Native nations and the American nation knew each other, grew up and around and through each other; that contact between the Lakota and European powers wasn’t one-sided and didn’t necessarily spell doom for Indians.” PEN America has announced the four

Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea Goodreads has announced their 2020 Choice Awards. Timothy D. Snyder, author of On Tyranny, has written a twenty-tweet thread on the post-election situation: “The mechanism to undo democracy is usually a fake emergency, a claim that internal enemies have done something outrageous.” The Los Angeles Times and Tribune Publishing have settled a class-action lawsuit, agreeing to pay three million dollars to address allegations of pay disparities between persons of color and white employees. The first pick for the online book club hosted by T: The New York Times Style Magazine is James Baldwin’s Go

Nicole R. Fleetwood The White Review is inviting proposals for a new two-year, part-time editorship. At New York’s Intelligencer, Reeves Wiedeman reports on the “ideological turf war” at the New York Times, talking with staff about how the paper has handled recent reckonings over diversity, institutional objectivity, the 1619 Project, and the Tom Cotton op-ed. “Change does not come swiftly to the Times,” Wiedeman writes, noting that the Trump presidency “has been a unifying force for the institutionalists and insurrectionists” at the paper. Wiedeman wonders how the paper will confront these issues, which have been “punted until after” the

Paul Tran. Photo: Emily Yoon CNN, The Guardian, and WorldCrunch look at front-page newspaper coverage of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Random House has released the cover image for poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, which will be published in March. The photo, shot by Gjon Mili in 1943, shows Willa Mae Ricker and Leon James, “ecstatic during the Lindy Hop.” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who has “long been seen as one of the biggest proponents in the White House of minimizing the threat” of COVID, tested

Raven Leilani. Photo: Nina Subin Facebook has an internal metric, “violence and incitement trends,” which has seen a 45 percent rise in recent days. The metric has apparently not been previously reported on. Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that she was heartened that Facebook monitors these trends. Still, Jankowicz stressed that it was not nearly enough: “We’re talking about the broader structure of Facebook that incentivizes these communities to organize and foster offline violence. . . . I’m not sure they have a handle on it at all. It’s a structure

Jason Reynolds. Photo: James J. Reddington CNN’s election night coverage used a graphic that referred to voters who are not Latino, Black, Asian, or white as “something else.” The Native American Journalists Association has responded that the network’s language “continues the efforts to erase Indigenous and other voters” and note that “being Native American is a political classification—not merely a racial background.” NAJA is demanding a public apology from CNN and proposes a meeting with senior editorial staff “to discuss how to improve the network’s coverage of Indian Country.” The New York Times’s Miami bureau chief, Patricia Mazzei, presents

Nikil Saval The former coeditor of n+1, Nikil Saval, has been elected to represent the first district in the Pennsylvania State Senate. The New York Times Style section covered Saval’s candidacy in May. At The Nation, D. D. Guttenplan reports on progressive activists in Pennsylvania: “Let the record show that if Joe Biden wins here, he was carried to victory on the backs of the Latinx and immigrant activists in Make the Road, the young Green New Deal enthusiasts in the Sunrise Movement, and the self-organized collection of mostly Bernie Sanders alums who provide the muscle behind Pennsylvania Stands

Bryan Washington. Photo: © Dailey Hubbard The London Review of Books is hosting a Twitter takeover for election night. From 5 PM to 3AM EST, contributors including Merve Emre, Stephanie Burt, Lauren Oyler, and Christian Lorentzen will tweet from the LRB’s account at will. Today, The Nation’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, will be “keeping an eye on the news and trying to keep you informed about challenges to people exercising their vote.” The “Election Day issue-spotter log” will be updated in real time here. Following a baffling tweet from Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance about daylight saving time

Maggie Nelson. Photo: Tom Atwood Yesterday, Jewish Currents editor David Klion posted a profile of Emily Ratajkowski, written by Thomas Chatterton Williams and Valentine Faure, that ran in the French edition of Marie Claire. A translation of the article has Williams describing Ratajkowski as having been “blessed with the most perfect breasts of her generation.” Williams also expresses surprise at the fact that Ratajkowski has read Roberto Bolaño. Ratajkowski herself has weighed in: “I really hope this will be the last of my ‘she has breasts AND claims to read’ profiles/interviews. Lots of levels of gross/embarrassing aspects to this

Kemi Badenoch. Photo: UK Parliament The Black Writers’ Guild has published a letter, signed by 101 members, “in support of antiracist writers and freedom of speech without misrepresentation” in response to recent comments made by UK Minister of Equalities Kemi Badenoch. For The Guardian, Sian Cain reports that Badenoch claimed some best-selling authors of antiracist books “actually want a segregated society.” In their letter, Guild members write that Badenoch’s allegation “is not only clearly false but dangerous” and call on the government to ensure ministers “act with a duty of care.” Wear Your Voice, a digital magazine by and

Bernardine Evaristo. Photo: Jennie Scott Bernardine Evaristo, the 2019 Booker Prize winner, selects six novels for Penguin UK’s “Black Britain: Writing Black” series. The new editions of books by Jacqueline Roy, S. I. Martin, C. L. R. James, Nicola Williams, Judith Bryan, and Mike Phillips will be published in February 2021. At Jewish Currents, Jess Bergman writes about Susan Taubes and her novel Divorcing, which is based on Taubes’s own separation from her husband Jacob and is newly back in print from New York Review Books. In the novel, Bergman notes, the uncoupling happens early, and “the ongoingness implied

Patricia Lockwood. Photo: © Grep Hoax Daniel Menaker, author and longtime editor for the New Yorker and Random House, passed away Monday at age seventy-nine. Over the years, he worked with Pauline Kael, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, V. S. Pritchett, and the formerly anonymous author of Primary Colors, a roman à clef of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Menaker’s final work, a recently completed book of poems about having cancer during the pandemic titled Terminalia, will be published and distributed this fall by Portal Press and n+1. The twenty-second annual Southern Music issue of Oxford American is available for preorder

Rick Perlstein. Photo: Meg Handler In their Power Issue, the New Yorker has published a lengthy excerpt from former President Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, about his administration’s health care reforms. At the New Republic, Tope Folarin discusses what it means that writers of color are walled off from “a genre that critics seem to constantly write about and whose practitioners are held up as the preeminent voices of their generation?” In a discussion of the whiteness of what critics and publishing houses deem autofiction, Folarin argues that the genre would “obviously benefit immensely” from stories about people

Jacqueline Rose Poet Diane di Prima, author of Revolutionary Letters and many other books, has died. On October 16, Delhi Police assaulted Ahan Penkar, a journalist on staff at The Caravan, at a police station while he was reporting on the alleged murder and rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Now, Amitava Kumar—author of many books, most recently Every Day I Write the Book—has responded to the attack with a poem. For the New York Review of Books’ special election issue, Jacqueline Rose dwells on “The Pleasures of Authoritarianism”: “No point . . . asking how bad it can get,

Saidiya Hartman. Photo: © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Used with permission (cropped). Alexis Okeowo profiles Saidiya Hartman and looks at the imaginative leaps taken in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, rather than fiction or nonfiction. “Fact is simply fiction endorsed with state power,” Hartman told Okeowo, discussing the limits of the archive in telling stories of enslaved people. “Are we going to be consigned forever to tell the same kinds of stories? Given the violence and power that has engendered this limit, why should

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. Photo © Talya Zemach-Bersin At the New Republic, David Klion looks at a new anthology of writing from The Atlantic from the last four years. Klion sees the magazine’s project as one of defending “American liberalism in the face of Trump’s clownish barbarism.” But, Klion argues, the default position of insistent reasonableness may have run its course: “What really comes through is the institutional voice of The Atlantic, which makes itself felt in nearly every contribution: clean, authoritative, high-minded, rigorously empirical, more than a bit self-righteous—and, once you’ve heard it enough times, utterly tedious.” Ottessa Moshfegh

Owl logo of Dorothy, a publishing project by Yelena Bryksenkova In the New York Times, Joshua Cohen reviews Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence: “DeLillo has never been content with merely reporting, however: He wants to tell us not just what-is, but how it feels, and it’s this ability to transcribe the moment’s emotion that constitutes his genius.” At Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop looks at how “herd immunity” and a potential COVID-19 vaccine are covered by the press: “In the absence of hard facts, many journalists, especially on TV, elide doubts, or filter the story of the pandemic

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Chris Close 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.

Leslie Jamison. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan In an op-ed for the Washington Post, author Jill Lepore urges us to “let history, not partisans, prosecute Trump.” “Surely, post-Trump, when that day comes, there will be investigations,” Lepore writes. “A bipartisan, 9/11-style commission to study the federal government’s response to the pandemic seems not only likely but essential. And Harvard Law School’s Mark Tushnet has argued for a non-prosecutorial, fact-finding “commission of inquiry” to investigate possible abuses of power by the Trump-era Justice Department. But the Trump administration is not Nazi Germany, nor is it a nation defeated in war. Its wrongdoing—a

Natalie Diaz Bhanu Kapil, Shane McRae, and Natalie Diaz are among the poets shortlisted for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Five of the ten titles on the list are out from recently established presses, and three are debut collections. “Why do we believe one set of paranoid, questionable hypotheses and not another?” N. K. Jemisin introduces Time’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time,” which presents influential works of fantasy fiction in chronological order, starting from the ninth century. For Jemisin, the genre is best thought of not as “mere entertainment,” but “as a way to train for