Literary Hub’s Emily Temple rounds up all the literary events happening in 2020. “It’s only January, so this calendar is necessarily incomplete,” she notes. “I expect we’ll have more than a few surprises in store in this cursed (or blessed?) year of our lord 2020.”
On the First Draft podcast, Mitzi Rapkin talks to Isabel Allende about literature, journalism, and her new book, A Long Petal of the Sea. “Few people allow themselves to be influenced or changed by books,” she said. “It takes a book sometimes decades, sometimes centuries, to have an effect, while journalism is very immediate and very powerful. You have minutes of something on TV, and you can create much more impact than a book can do in many, many years.”
Glenn Greenwald has been charged “with cybercrimes for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force” in Brazil, the New York Times reports. In a statement, The Intercept said the charges were politically motivated. “There is no democracy without a free press, and defenders of the press everywhere should be deeply concerned about Bolsonaro’s latest authoritarian move,” they wrote.
Business Insider, Vox Media, The Information, Politico, and Axios were all profitable in 2019, “in several cases for the first time ever,” Axios reports.
At the New York Times, Kim Severson profiles Iliana Regan, a Chicago-based chef and memoir author. With her wife, Regan recently bought a cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that they hope to turn into an inn where guests can “immerse themselves in what some chefs and writers have started calling ‘new gatherer’ or ‘deep nature’ cooking.”