Paper Trail

“The Guardian” removes TERF-critical paragraphs of Judith Butler interview; Atticus Lish on masculinity


Judith Butler. Photo: Verso

Hours after publishing an interview with Judith Butler yesterday, The Guardian removed whole paragraphs of the interview, apparently “folding” under pressure from transphobic readers. In the removed section, Butler answered a question about the alliance between far-right groups and certain factions of feminism in part by denouncing trans-exclusionary radical feminists as fascists. As Emanuel Maiberg reports for Motherboard, “it is exceedingly rare for long passages to be cut from articles with such a cryptic update note, and is even rarer for a question-and-answer to be deleted from a high profile interview without any real explanation to readers.”

For InsideHook, Jason Diamond writes about his recent obsession with reading novels written by journalists, noting that “in the debate over whether it’s better to go the MFA route or just move to New York City if you want to become a writer, a third option might be best of all: spend some time reporting news.” Diamond consulted journalist-turned-fiction-writer Laura Lippman, who offered this advice: “Volunteer to do weather stories. If you can write about a five-day heat wave and no two stories are alike, that’s invaluable training.”

At the New York Times, Molly Fischer writes about charm, Marlowe Granados’s debut novel, Happy Hour, and the “bygone young women on the make” the book evokes.

For the Paris Review, Matthew Shen Goodman interviews Atticus Lish about his new novel The War for Gloria. Lish describes the book as “psychologically a prequel to Preparation For The Next Life. Preparation is basically like, I’m a guy, you touch my woman, I’m going to murder you. The War for Gloria is how a guy might start thinking that way. Why would you think that you have to be able to take on anybody and to do anything?”

Elizabeth Hinton and Margaret O’Mara are joining Princeton University Press as series editors for Politics and Society in Modern America.