At The Guardian, Sammy Feldblum profiles Daniel Denvir, the journalist and host of the socialist podcast The Dig. Since October 7, the podcast has been primarily devoted to discussing the war in Gaza and the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” about the Arab world in the US. This week, Denvir is attending the DNC as an alternate delegate of Rhode Island to represent the Uncommitted movement. “Our uncommitted delegation will be inviting Harris delegates from across the nation to join us in calling for an arms embargo on Israel,” Denvir said. “We speak for the majority of Democratic voters who have long supported a ceasefire.”
In their editorial from the forthcoming print issue of n+1, the magazine’s editors discuss Biden’s hollow presidency, the Democratic party and Kamala Harris’s campaign, and the ongoing crisis in Gaza: “On Gaza, Harris will be a better President than Donald Trump because the Republican Party operates with total bloodlust, no matter what credulous commentators say about Trump and Vance’s ‘isolationism.’ But being better than Trump is nowhere near enough.”
In a new episode of their podcast Know Your Enemy, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell revisit J. D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy in an attempt to answer the question: “How did Vance become so weird—and menacing?”
In the September issue of Harper’s, Sheila Heti writes about her obsession with the new-age bible A Course in Miracles and its author, Helen Schucman. “When I first started reading the Course, I had marveled enviously at how Helen had produced such a steady flow of words for years on end. Yet now I felt it would be pretty easy to call forth an endless stream of poetic jib-jab if it helped you keep the man you loved close. Even I could do that!”
An excerpt from Annie Ernaux’s The Use of Photography—which will be published in English by Seven Stories Press this October—is up at the New Yorker.
Rose Books, the independent press based in Sedona, Arizona and founded by essayist Chelsea Hodson, is seeking submissions for its first printed collection: “We’re looking for an engagement with emotional extremes or environmental collapse or feelings of bodily entrapment; work that is desperate, unhinged, hallucinatory, hormonal.” Submissions will be accepted until September 10.