New York City novelist and reporter Pete Hamill has died at the age of eighty-five. The Brooklyn-born author was a longtime newspaper columnist and the author of numerous books, including nonfiction titles such as A Drinking Life, Why Sinatra Matters, and Downtown: My Manhattan; as well as more than a dozen novels. When asked about his favorite city, Hamill stressed its vastness, which inspired him for more than six decades: “There’s no one New York. There’s multiple New Yorks. Anybody who sits and says ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates will guest edit the September Vanity Fair, a special issue on art, power, and activism.
At Forge, Gabrielle Bellot considers what to do when your heroes fail you. Reflecting on some of her favorite writers and artists whose politics have disappointed her, Bellot counsels: “We shouldn’t eternally venerate anyone but the person our ‘heroes’ have helped us become, the person who took a book or a poem or a TV show and used it to transform into a stronger person. We should revere that person, even if we’ve become someone else since then.”
At the New York Times, digital revenue has exceeded print earnings for the first time in the publication’s history. The paper added more than six-hundred-thousand new subscribers in the most recent quarter.
This month, the Noname Book Club is reading Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free.” The club has shared questions and resources about the article, which they will be discussing with the author via Zoom this weekend.