At The Point, a conversation with professor and critic Toril Moi about academic writing and being a public intellectual. Moi believes that every article should be interesting and fun to read, and urges her students to not hide behind theory. Moi tells interviewer Jessica Swoboda: “When theory is just applied to a text, it’s being treated as a security blanket that protects you from having to reveal yourself. If that’s the case, whatever you’re writing will always be bad, at least in the sense that it will be utterly predictable.”
The Authors Guild has tools and resources for opposing the banning of books by school boards.
The Story Prize has announced its three finalists for this year’s award: Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King, Let Me Think by J. Robert Lennon and Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor.
LitHub has an excerpt of Laura Kipnis’s new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, which explores what the pandemic has revealed about our intimate relationships. Kipnis observes of the beginning of lockdown, “Random field notes from the early days of immersive coupledom: feeling simultaneously comforted by the little domestic routines and imprisoned by the endless neurotic repetition compulsions.”
For the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner looks into why Vanity Fair did not publish allegations of sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein in a 2003 article.
At New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Sarah Jones recaps the on-air reaction of CNN hosts to the news that CNN president Jeff Zucker was resigning. Zucker left the network after disclosing a relationship with executive vice-president and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust. Jones speculates that it was not the relationship itself that caused the scandal, but the fact that Gollust used to work for Andrew Cuomo. Jones writes, “CNN’s entanglement with the Cuomos is squarely on Zucker, and this now-soured relationship at least indirectly led to Zucker’s current troubles. But you wouldn’t know that from watching CNN.”