Marty Baron of the Washington Post has announced that he is retiring at the end of February. Baron had been the executive editor of the paper for the last eight years, a period in which the Post dramatically increased its staff and its digital subscription model became successful. Before joining the Post, Baron was at the Boston Globe, where he oversaw reporting on sexual abuse by priests in the city.
The Cut profiles critic Lauren Oyler, whose debut novel, Fake Accounts, will be published next Tuesday. Known as a tough critic unafraid to write a takedown, Oyler professes to being serene about how her book will be received: “I’m sure one or two people will try to do a hit job, but that’s fine if it’s fair . . . If you’re somebody that nobody’s criticizing, nobody’s taking you very seriously.” For more from Oyler, see her Bookforum archives. She will appear at a virtual book event with Emily Gould on Tuesday, where the two will discuss Oyler’s novel and Gould’s Perfect Tunes, which is coming out this spring in paperback.
You Are Not a Loan, a new short documentary by Astra Taylor, captures the conversation around canceling student debt. The film features members of the Debt Collective, a debtors union that Taylor helped to found, and which organized to make student debt a central part of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaigns.
James Bennet, the former New York Times editorial page director who resigned after publishing a controversial op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, has been hired by The Economist as “visiting senior editor.” At the Times, Bennet’s interim replacement, Pulitzer-winning journalist Kathleen Kingsbury, has officially stepped into the position of opinion editor.
In celebration of the New York Times Book Review’s 125th anniversary, the publication is presenting twenty-five selections from the archives, by writers including Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Patrica Highsmith, Colson Whitehead, and many more. In 1949, Vladimir Nabokov reviewed Jean-Paul Sarte’s Nausea, writing: “Sartre’s name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called ‘existentialist’ one finds quite a few ‘suctorialists’ (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre’s first novel, ‘La Nausée,’ should enjoy some success.”
This Thursday at noon EST, the Chappaqua Library will host an online conversation between novelists Rumaan Alam and Lynn Steger Strong. Tickets are free.