Mike Davis, the activist, historian, and scholar, has died at age seventy-six. Jon Wiener, the coauthor of Davis’s latest book, offers a remembrance in The Nation. According to Wiener, “Mike hated being called ‘a prophet of doom.’ Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door. But when he wrote about climate change or viral pandemics, he was not offering a ‘prophecy’; he was reporting on the latest research.” Back in July, Davis talked with the Los Angeles Times about hope: “I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless.”
Authors Toni Morrison (Beloved, The Bluest Eye) and Ernest J. Gaines (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying) will be on next year’s slate of USPS stamps.
Lindsay Zoladz has joined the New York Times Culture and Newsletter teams as a pop-music critic. As part of the new job, Zoladz will be writing a song-recommendation newsletter. She is also currently working on a book called Fear of a Female Genius. You can read Zoladz’s contributions to Bookforum here, including pieces on the Mets, Dolly Parton, bad taste, Sasha Geffen, Emily Gould, and more.
At the New York Times, Molly Young meditates on the essential novels of Philip K. Dick: “The K stands for ‘Kindred.’ It was a family name, but if there’s anyone who can forgive a fanciful imputation of significance, it is Philip K. Dick. How lovely that a poet of alienation would come into existence bearing that word.”
The New Yorker’s culture desk has an excerpt of Thomas Beller’s new book on basketball, Lost in the Game, “On Outscoring My Father,” Beller recently took part in Bookforum’s panel on sports and literature, which you can watch here.