The New York Times has a report on Black book clubs. Noname, the rapper and producer, started a reading group last August that now has almost 10,000 subscribers on Patreon. She told the Times, “I think when you start questioning systems, it helps you to open up other parts of your humanity.”
In the New York Review of Books, Jonathan Freedland considers the state of fake news, disinformation, hacking, trolling, and political warfare in the era of COVID-19. Writing of the 2016 attacks on the US presidential election—and the inevitable ones coming this November—Freedland notes that disinformation campaigns have a long history. Still, he writes, “it would not be right to conclude that today’s disinformation efforts are simply a high-tech version of those of the past. The differences are more substantial than that. Today’s active measures are simultaneously more personal and much broader in reach than before.”
Nieman Reports looks at the question of whether newsrooms are prepared to handle hack-and-leak incidents such as the 2016 release of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee.
E. Tammy Kim reflects on the origins and limitations of the term “people of color” at the New Yorker. Kim notes that in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the phrase “fails to capture the disproportionate per-capita harm to Blacks at the hands of the state,” and that “rejecting the solidarity it implies can result in an inaccurate and unduly limiting world view.”
Tonight, via Zoom, McNally Jackson is hosting the Pigeon Pages reading series, featuring Kiley Reid, Frances Cha, and Aekta Khubchandani.