The New York magazine union reached a deal with management yesterday after two and a half years of negotiations.
Olivia Nuzzi, New York’s Washington correspondent, is developing a satirical drama for TV. Deadline reports that the series will follow “a young reporter in DC who defects from the mainstream media” and star Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh.
For the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about Tema Stauffer’s photo series “Southern Fiction.” Stauffer’s subjects include William Faulkner’s kitchen, the street where Richard Wright grew up, and Eudora Welty’s library. But as Cep writes, “Stauffer’s pictures are not illustrations of particular literary works or portraits of individual writers but, rather, invocations of people and places, both real and imagined. Taken together, they capture the intellectual and aesthetic challenges posed by biography, but also by geography—and specifically by the American South.”
For The Nation, Alyse Burnside writes about McKenzie Wark’s new book, Philosophy for Spiders. Wark had a short, intense relationship with Kathy Acker in the 1990s, and, in her new book, Wark develops a “low theory” of Acker’s writing and philosophy. In the review, Burnside explains the book’s main metaphor as being “the spider weaving her web, which aptly describes Wark’s process of concretizing Acker’s worldview, in which Acker provides the silk, and Wark performs the weaving.” For more on Acker, read David Velasco’s review of the Chris Kraus biography, and Elizabeth Gumport’s consideration of a volume collecting Wark and Acker’s 1990s email correspondence.
A. S. Hamrah’s latest column for The Baffler covers the last year of pandemic cinema with reviews of two dozen films, including Tsai Ming-liang’s Days, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, and more. Of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Hamrah writes: “I don’t trust a magazine without a film critic, especially one in a movie based on The New Yorker directed by someone who famously courted Pauline Kael’s approval.”