Yesterday Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff reported for the Ankler that Random House has decided not to publish a collection of Norman Mailer’s political writings in 2023. Wolff’s article cited a Random House source who blames a “junior staffer’s objection” to the essay “The White Negro” and the idea that Roxane Gay might also object. (Wolff clarified that Gay “may have been employed as merely a generic type of objector.”)The story lit up Twitter for the day, for better and for worse. In his newsletter, Jeet Heer took stock of the story and the larger issue of how authors’ reputations evolve. As for the question about whether Mailer was “cancelled,” Heer observes, “He’s not a victim of cancellation but the natural fluctuation of literary reputation. To have enjoyed immense fame and wealth in life is no bad fate, even accounting for minor posthumous reputational slippage.”
The New York Times media columnist Ben Smith is leaving the paper to start a new news organization with Justin Smith, the Bloomberg Media executive. Explaining the new venture, Ben Smith told an interviewer: “There are 200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us.” For the Times, Ben Smith had covered TikTok, labor organizing in media, a scoop about why some of the biggest names at the New Yorker didn’t join the union, the Axel Springer scandal, and the scene around New York’s “Dimes Square,” among other top stories in media.
For his Myself with Others podcast, Adam Shatz talks with French journalist Alain Gresh. The two discuss Gresh’s Cairo childhood, the battles over secularization in France, decolonization, and more.
For the New Yorker, Alejandro Chacoff writes about “the other great series of novels about a middle-aged Norwegian”: Carl Frode Tiller’s Encircling trilogy. The series follows a character named David, in part through letters written by his friends and acquaintances, none of whom are members of David’s family. “It is thus left to the reader to sort out who is central and who is not,” Chacoff writes, “who are the main characters in David’s life and who are the supporting cast. Did Jon really have an intense love affair with him, as Jon claims, or was it merely a few meaningless hookups, as Silje seems to suggest?’
Richard Kim, former editor of HuffPost and The Nation, is joining The City, an independent nonprofit newsroom that serves New Yorkers.