On Wednesday, July 6th, Dana Spiotta will talk about her new novel, Wayward, with George Saunders at the Center for Fiction. The event is free and will be held on Zoom.
At the New Yorker, Sam Lipsyte discusses his latest story for the magazine, which is about a man crafting an apology to co-workers. Lipsyte has long been drawn to workplaces in his fiction. As he explains, “Since so many readers know what it’s like to have a job, you can make more daring swerves and leaps with the details and emotional patterns and modes of speech.”
Mahogany L. Browne has been named Lincoln Center’s first poet in residence. The residency will run from July through September and include readings, performances, film screenings, and other events both in-person and virtual.
At Vox, Carlos Aguilar looks at the lack of diversity in arts criticism: “Being a critic means having power—power to spearhead the chatter around a certain piece of art, its significance, and the prospects of its creator. So it’s crucial that the critical community reflects everyone who is part of the society consuming the work that is up for discussion.”
The Media Voices podcast examines how Defector has managed to get nearly 40,000 paying subscribers just nine months after it launched. The media company is employee-owned and funded almost exclusively by subscriptions.
Vanity Fair has an epic story on Gavin McInnes, a partner in the early years of the VICE magazine empire who went on to found the Proud Boys. Written by former VICE editor Adam Leith Gollner, the profile tracks how McInnes’s deep-seated desire to incite and offend was expressed through punk and VICE’s provocations before McInnes openly embraced “Western chauvinism” and Donald Trump. Gollner observes how the falling out between VICE media and McInnes was almost Shakespearean, as his former friends and partners went on to find success and power as McInnes’s politics became more radicalized. But, Gollner writes, it is not so easy to separate the two sides of McInnes’s story: “Shakespearean or not, McInnes started both Vice magazine and the Proud Boys, and one metastasized out of the other.”