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 grant for a program he is involved with that supports study groups and provides books to incarcerated participants. Felber told the Mississippi Free Press that history department chair Dr. Noell Wilson “communicated to him that the project was political rather than historical and could potentially harm the history department’s ability to procure funding.”
In the Times, Parul Sehgal reviews A Bite of the Apple, the new memoir by Lennie Goodings, chair of the British feminist press Virago.
Vice reports that the message board posts attributed to the anonymous insider known to followers of QAnon simply as “Q” are almost certainly authored by more than one person, according to textual analysis by OrphAnalytics. This finding, writes David Gilbert, “undermines the entire QAnon belief system.”
BuzzFeed News reports on a shared list of “Toxic White Progressives,” put together by Maya Cantrell, a democratic operative who wanted an anonymous forum to address racism and harmful behavior in the party. One word got out, though, the list quickly became part of the problem it was trying to address, as Cantrell tells Ruby Cramer: “We couldn’t even have a day to talk about racism in the places we work before our white colleagues consumed it as group-chat gossip.”
The winter issue of Yale Review features correspondence between Namwali Serpell and Maria Tumarkin, investigating morality and identification, the importance of time to their work, and why “reading for empathy” can be a reductive model. “Literature doesn’t create our capacity for empathy (or, really, identification and projection),” Serpell notes, “our capacity for empathy allows us to create and read literature. And neither empathy nor literature is necessarily a form of moral action. To be clear, language can be active, can do things in the world—consider political policies or declarations of independence—but that doesn’t mean all language-based forms do.”