For the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner interviews Israeli activist Hagai El-Ad about the West Bank.
In The Drift, seven short essays on Gaza by Bobuq Sayed, Dylan Saba, Hadas Binyamini, Mariam Barghouti, Nasreen Abd Elal, Natan Last, and Sophia Goodfriend.
n+1 has launched its 2023 Bookmatch personality test. If you donate any amount to support the magazine, you’ll be able to take a brief quiz that editors and friends of n+1 will use to create a personalized reading list for you. This year, the recommendations will come from authors including Hernan Diaz, Deborah Eisenberg, Miranda July, Alexander Chee, Alexandra Schwartz, Blair McClendon, Christine Smallwood, and many more.
Hundreds of writers have signed a letter boycotting Artforum and other Penske Media Corporation (PMC) art publications, including Art in America and ARTnews, in the wake of editor David Velasco’s firing.
In the New York Times, Jacob Bernstein reports on the ghostwriters behind Britney Spears’s new memoir The Woman In Me. According to two anonymous sources close to the project, three writers—Ada Calhoun, Sam Lansky, and Luke Dempsey—and editor Lauren Spiegel all made significant contributions to the book, with Calhoun creating the first draft. Writing about the book for Vulture, Christine Smallwood notes, “It turns out that Britney’s search for joy, her expression of freedom, is nothing other than the desperate attempt to come back and win the same game she lost for so long.”
In The Nation’s Books & the Arts, Vikram Murthi writes about Annie Baker’s new play: “Pain is paradoxical in Infinite Life: As the physical self becomes disconnected from an intensely negative feeling, like a severed limb lying across the room, the mind is left to constantly make sense of the emergency at hand.”