At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop rounds up and reflects on media coverage of the school shooting yesterday in Uvalde, Texas, and “all the horribly repetitive cadences” of the responses to the tragedy. Yesterday at Politico, Chris Suellentrop described mass shootings as “America’s copy and paste tragedy.” Allsop argues that “this repetition need not hamstring coverage; it can be grimly illustrative and, if framed correctly, even galvanizing.”
Critic Jasmine Sanders will be leading a reading group at the Center for Fiction on Margo Jefferson’s new memoir Constructing a Nervous System and Willa Cather’s Künstlerroman The Song of the Lark, which Jefferson takes as a model. For more on Jefferson’s latest book, see Blair McClendon’s review in the current issue of Bookforum.
In his latest Substack post, Brandon Taylor considers a handful of recent essays that seem to claim contemporary gay fiction is “too serious or not serious enough, too sad or too happy, too focused on trauma or too irreverent, too ironic or too sincere, too much about sex or not enough, not realistic about apps and hook ups or too realistic about apps and hook-ups.” To the authors of such essays, Taylor writes, “you’re not annoyed at ‘gay fiction.’ You’re annoyed or disappointed in like, three or four writers, my friend.”
In Document’s tenth anniversary issue, Iggy Pop and Ottessa Moshfegh discuss music, writing, contemporary culture, and one of Moshfegh’s favorite movies, Dead Man, in which Pop plays a role and Jim Jarmusch directs. Of Jarmusch’s Stooges documentary, Gimme Danger, Pop observes, “One day I got the movie. And I thought, This is very good. This is right. I was rewarded for my audacity and good taste, because the band was interesting and of quality.”
CNN reports on video footage, audio recordings, and eyewitness accounts indicating that the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces in a targeted attack.