Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died on Monday at the age of ninety-one. “His singular quality was being mischievous,” said Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist who drew the illustrations for Tollbooth. “He saw humor as turning everything on its head.”
After merging with BuzzFeed in mid-February, 47 of HuffPost’s 190 employees have been laid off, in addition to the entire staff of HuffPost Canada. According to writer Laura Bassett, employees “were invited to a meeting…with the password ‘spring is here,’” and told that many of them would be let go. Staff were subsequently informed whether they still had their jobs via email. Jenna Amatulli, senior editor at HuffPost, has made a Twitter thread listing the reporters, producers, and editors who are newly out of work.
The trial of Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri is underway in Iowa. Hers is a rare and troubling instance of a journalist being prosecuted for charges raised while covering a protest. Prosecutors did not “mention [Sahouri’s] profession during opening statements,” the Washington Post reports, and have claimed her being a journalist was “irrelevant” to what has been presented as a matter of noncompliance with police instructions. “This case is about a reporter who was arrested while doing her job,” the defense opened. “She was assaulted.”
Alexi McCammond, the new editor in chief of Teen Vogue, has apologized to staff for anti-Asian and anti-gay tweets she wrote in the past.
In a review of Jackie Polzin’s debut novel, Brood, Elizabeth McCracken wonders: “Why should novelists review novels? We believe so much about novel writing because it suits our purposes, from what constitutes literature to style to punctuation. Mightn’t we be the worst people in the world for the job? Some novelists do it well, I guess, sociopaths who do not feel bad reviews the way the rest of us do.”
Cornel West is leaving Harvard after the university refused to grant him tenure. West has been awarded tenure and the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, effective in July.