At the Paris Review, Kate Zambreno and Sarah Manguso discuss motherhood, capitalism, and Zambreno’s new book, Appendix Project. “The body is so often left out of the question of writing. I needed to be a writer after I gave birth—I needed to think and have a vehicle or container in which to think,” Zambreno said. “Everyone was telling me that becoming a mother would take away that existential drive to make work—but it was the opposite. I have never felt more full of life and death, and it made me become reborn as a writer, through the joy, and the suffering.”
The Liar author Nora Roberts is suing Cristiane Serruya, a Brazilian novelist, for plagiarism.
“For nearly two years, Trump has attempted to inoculate himself against the findings of the Mueller Report by assailing it as a ‘witch hunt.’ He has cynically used the right-wing echo chamber to amplify his false assertions (‘no collusion) and last week he received a big assist from William Barr,” writes Michiko Kakutani on the importance of reading the full report. “The best antidote to this is the report itself which, in methodically putting the jigsaw puzzle pieces together, gives us a potent, clear-eyed and factual account of what happened.”
At Politico, Steven Perlberg looks at how The Intercept has evolved from an “activist voice for privacy and civil liberties” to “a more classic ‘gotcha’ approach to campaign reporting, and landed in a unique spot in the media ecosystem—as the loudest voice attacking Democrats from the left.”
“In the current political environment, name-checking the writing of James Joyce may not seem like the canniest move,” writes Kevin Dettmar of Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden’s predilections for quoting the Ulysses author. “It’s a dog whistle, meant to appeal to refined impulses, to élite rather than populist sympathies. How shall we put it? Joyce is a snob whistle.”
