Craig Morgan Teicher interviews poet Kaveh Akbar for the Paris Review Daily. They discuss Akbar’s second collection, Pilgrim Bell, figuring out “how to train your instincts and then get out of the way,” and self-consciousness. Of the state of poetry, Akbar says, “I feel like a lot of people operate as if poetry is teetering on the brink of extinction, and it’s all of our jobs to sort of huddle around the final flame of poetry and defend it. I think it’s doing great.”
Nathan J. Robinson, author of Why You Should Be a Socialist, had a change of heart about the workers’ co-op the staff at his magazine Current Affairs were forming. He asked most of the staff to resign and removed their access to the company’s Slack channel. According to Gawker, he sent this email to his comrades: “I was in denial about the fact that the answer is I think I should be on top of the org chart, with everyone else selected by me and reporting to me. I let Current Affairs build up into a sort of egalitarian community of friends while knowing in my heart that I still thought of it as my project over which I should have control.” Robinson now says he “made a horrible call in judgement” and is working on severance agreements and what the next steps forward might be. Gawker has followed-up their initial reporting with a blow-by-blow account of what happened, including commentary from a regretful Robinson. The magazine is on hiatus until September.
Thirty-nine employees at two Brooklyn locations of Greenlight Bookstore and one of their stationary stores have unionized. Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, a co-owner of Greenlight, told Publishers Weekly: “Greenlight supports the work of unions in general, and we support our staff in their organizing efforts.”
At Columbia Journalism Review, Tim Schwab writes about journalistic conflicts of interest, writing of recent controversies at the New York Times: “the Times, like many news outlets, still struggles to manage journalists who have financial relationships with the subjects of their reporting.”
Literary Hub’s Book Marks has “five reviews you need to read this week” including Christian Lorentzen on Atticus Lish, Jo Livingstone on Joel E. Dimsdale, Rachel Cooke on Frances Wilson, and more.
For the Chronicle of Higher Education, Merve Emre and Len Gutkin talk with Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon about their book Permanent Crisis. Introducing the new book, Emre and Gutkin write that it “suggests that today’s preoccupation with crisis in the humanities is historically and conceptually overdetermined, less a response to current material realities than baked into the modern humanities’ self-conception.” Reitter calls this tendency “a sad irony.”