At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House about Hurricane Katrina, which hit fifteen years ago this week. This Saturday, Broom will discuss New Orleans as part of the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has won the International Booker Prize for their novel The Discomfort of Evening. At twenty-nine years old, Rijneveld is the youngest person to have won the award. They will split the award with translator Michele Hutchison.
Ava DuVernay talks with Angela Davis at Vanity Fair about the movement for Black lives. Davis urges activists to broaden the conversation: “This is, as you said, a racial reckoning. . . . But I think we have to talk about capitalism. Capitalism has always been racial capitalism. Wherever we see capitalism, we see the influence and the exploitation of racism.”
At Esquire, Emma Copley Eisenberg writes about the publishing norm that puts the responsibility of fact-checking most nonfiction books on the author. Eisenberg calls for a new industry-wide standard: “The more we ask the big, shifty questions about power and privilege and truth, the more our foundation must be rock solid. Editors must insist on fact checking budgets for their authors, and authors must keep insisting for them such that we can all pay fact checkers fairly.”
At Columbia Journalism Review, Jason Cherkis looks back on his own blind spots and misjudgements as a crime reporter: “As a society. . . . We need to make a habit of treating the school social worker, the needle exchange volunteer, the legal aid attorneys, as sources equivalent to those with a gun and a badge.”