Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen talks to The 19th cofounder Emily Ramshaw about launching the news site in the middle of a pandemic and why political reporting is more important than ever. The nonprofit news site was announced in January and will still be launched this summer. “For us, the primary obsession this summer and into the fall will be the politics of the pandemic and what that means for women — deeply exploring the ways in which women are disproportionately affected by this moment, which may be a heck of a lot longer than a moment,” Ramshaw explained. “It became abundantly clear that in virtually every arena except for mortality rates, women were going to be disproportionately affected by this pandemic.”
Gucci Mane is writing a second book. The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness will be published in October by Simon & Schuster.
The Guardian offers a list of novels about burnout.
“I’ve felt astonished by our apparent inability to panic as a culture,” Lydia Millet tells Kristin Iversen at Literary Hub. “Our sort of frozen, inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything. Our selfishness; the way we set our sights so defiantly on our personal matters to the exclusion of everything else.”
Stanley Johnson’s 1982 novel The Virus is being republished in the UK by Black Spring. Johnson, who is the father of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was incredulous when asked by The Guardian if it was opportunistic to look for a new publisher for the book in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m a professional writer,” he said. “Is it opportunistic for journalists and newspapers to be writing about the coronavirus?”