In a column for Harper’s Magazine, Hari Kunzru writes about his decision to withdraw from the PEN America literary festival as a protest against the organization’s failure to stand up for Palestinian writers. Kunzru takes on critics such as George Packer, who claim that an “authoritarian spirit” motivates critics of the war in Gaza who have boycotted PEN. And he contrasts PEN President Suzanne Nossel’s statement of support for Ukrainian writers with the lack of a similar sentiment for Palestinians: “Whatever your opinions about the causes or conduct of the war, one has to ask why, if the right to freedom of expression is universal, one national culture should be worthy of such a passionate defense while another is not.”
Conde Nast and OpenAI have announced a new partnership. As Reuters reports, the AI company is now licensed to use writing from Conde magazines like the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue.
In the Cleveland Review of Books, Cary Stough considers the squabbles, labor conditions, and self-searching criticism behind a thriving genre: the translator’s note. Stough writes, “The anxiety of authorial influence in the art of translation remains partly immanent to translators themselves, the myths they’ve kept alive about the task precisely by their perennial self-criticism.”
LitHub runs down some of the best new books out this week, including a new biography of Audre Lorde, a history of the Bronx, and a new novel by Alejandro Puyana.
For The Baffler, Sammy Feldblum looks back at Medium Cool, a mostly forgotten film about the 1968 DNC convention in Chicago that came out in 1969. Feldblum writes that the movie “probes seriously the connections, and ruptures, between what is happening in the forgotten neighborhoods of Chicago, the unrest in the streets, and party politics.”