The New Republic is redesigning its print edition, introducing a metered paywall to its website, and has launched a new podcast, The Politics of Everything. Editor Chris Lehmann said that the new look has a “strong editorial message at the heart of it. The New Republic was created to address industrial capitalism and the rise of consumer culture . . . and in many ways we are facing many similar challenges in the age of Donald Trump
A man has been charged with the muder of Irish journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot last year during a riot in Derry. For on McKee’s life and death, see this remembrance in the New Yorker.
At Columbia Journalism Review, a Q&A with Hamed Aleaziz, a reporter whose work sparked a House inquiry into medical care for ICE detainees. When asked which recent policy change has had the biggest impact on migrants, Aleaziz points to the rule that forces asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while they wait to be heard, noting that guards and border officials are concerned about the change: “Officers tell me, ‘This is a human rights violation, this is unbelievable, this should not be happening.’”
Brandon Yu considers the recent success of Asian American authors such as Susan Choi, Alexander Chee, Min Jin Lee, and Viet Thanh Nguyen: “A tricky aspect of identifying an Asian American wave through the lens of establishment recognition—marquee awards and publication under the major publishing houses—is arguably to embolden the claim that the insular and myopic publishing industry constitutes the sole validating force for communities and work that have always existed.”
In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith writes about Kara Walker: “Walker’s particular mode of engaging with our attention spans—her visual and conceptual provocations—have often caused furor, first from the generation above her, now not infrequently from the generation below. For when it comes to the ruins of history, Walker neither simply represents nor reclaims.”
Tonight at the Strand, author John Carreyrou talks about his book Bad Blood, which tracks the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.