In the latest episode of the Harper’s Magazine podcast, Christian Lorentzen discusses the evolution of critic Christopher Hitchens’s work with host Violet Lucca and guests Luke Savage and Maureen Tkacik. In the August issue of Harper’s, Lorentzen reviewed a new collection of Hitchens’s London Review of Books pieces.
Members of the New York Times Union have conducted a report on racial disparities in performance review scores, which affect the size of bonuses employees receive. The study, whose dataset starts from 2018, shows that “being Hispanic reduced the odds of receiving a high score by about 60%, and being Black cut the chances of high scores by nearly 50%.”
Read the final installment of the Paris Review’s series of Clarice Lispector’s crônicas. The short writings could be on any subject she chose, and were originally published in a Brazilian newspaper in the 1960s and ’70s. On March 13, 1971, Lispector reflected on animals: “Regarding chickens and their relationships with each other, with people, and above all with their gestation period, I have said all there is to say. I have also spoken about monkeys.”
For the New Republic, Jillian Steinhauer reviews architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange’s new book on the history and decline of American shopping malls: “A question kept nagging me as I read Meet Me by the Fountain—one that Lange answers but not, I think, completely convincingly: Should malls be saved?”
At the London Review of Books, editors have compiled a selection of archival pieces on “making and breaking,” featuring writing by Jenny Diski, Sheila Heti, Terry Eagleton, and others.