The New York Times looks back at the artists who died in 2019—including Toni Morrison, Harold Bloom, and Mary Oliver. The Times Book Review looks forward to the most anticipated works of 2020, including Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and a new collection of unpublished stories by Zora Neale Hurston.
The Guardian explains the etiquette of giving books as gifts.
At NiemanLab, journalists offer their predictions for the journalism industry in the coming year. Julia Chan writes that newsrooms need to allow reporters to take breaks, especially for those reporting on the 2020 election. Simon Galperin explains how unionized and non-profit newsrooms will create “a coalition that the capitalists will not withstand.” Lauren Duca claims that “a model of ethical influencing” can be expanded “into a broader journalistic culture in which citizens comprehend the purpose of the journalist and their personal duty to empower themselves with information.”
The editors of the Times’s “1619 Project” have responded to historians who requested corrections. “Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding,” editor Jake Silverstein wrote. “While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”
Jeanette Winterson talks to The Guardian about artificial intelligence, the future, and her most recent novel, Frankissstein. “What with Brexit and Trump and climate breakdown, the development of AI and how it will impact on our lives isn’t getting the right kind of attention,” she said. “Because we are profoundly stupid, we’re going to share the planet with a self-created non-biological lifeform smarter than we are! Well done, human race!”