Elle profiles the New York Times’s investigative editor Rebecca Corbett. Corbett oversaw the paper’s reports on the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey consider Corbett to be a crucial third member of their team, calling her their “true north.” The Elle story makes Corbett’s dedication clear: She usually begins editing after a full day of meetings and sometimes works through the night. Before joining the Times in 2004, Corbett was an editor for more than twenty years at the Baltimore Sun, where she supervised two Pulitzer Prize–winning projects and mentored David Simon (she makes a cameo in the last season of The Wire). Kantor and Twohey call her “skeptical, scrupulous, and allergic to flashiness or exaggeration.”
Lit Hub asked “the best readers we know”—booksellers—to recap their favorite titles of the year.
Author and journalist Karl E. Meyer has died at the age of ninety-one. Meyer covered Castro’s rise in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and worked as a senior writer at the New York Times until 1998. He wrote, co-authored, or edited more than a dozen books. In a 1990 anthology of newspaper columns, Meyer commented on the rise of opinion journalism: “Readers, swamped by fact, turned to editorials for selection and judgement, salted by adjectives not sanctioned in news departments.”
At NPR, Julie Andrews discusses her new memoir, Home Work, which she co-authored with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton.
Ron Charles looks back at the book trends of the 2010s: indie bookstores are back, audiobooks are on the rise, and novels now form the basis of prestige TV.