Paper Trail

The New Yorker Union prepares a strike; Larissa Pham on taste


Larissa Pham. Photo: Adalena Kavanagh

The New Yorker Union is preparing to strike, after more than two years of bargaining. On their website, union members explain why they are ready to strike, and how readers, subscribers, and freelancers can hold the picket line if the union does strike.

ProPublica has begun publishing a new series based on the tax records of billionaires. The first installment shows how wealthy Americans like Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Elon Musk avoid paying taxes. ProPublica writes that in the coming months it will take an in-depth look at how high earners game the system.

Choire Sicha is leaving the New York Times to become an editor-at-large for New York magazine. According to a press release, Sicha will write short and long-form pieces and “be a roving observer, critic and reporter, finding opportunities to narrate this country’s swiftly changing cultural landscape.”

On June 10th, the Free Library of Philadelphia is hosting a virtual event with Carol Anderson, who will discuss her new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, with Tracey Matisak.

More than fourteen thousand authors are taking the #1000wordsofsummer challenge, organized by fiction writer Jami Attenberg. Attenberg’s newsletter Craft Talk offers advice and support from writers such as Celeste Ng, Lauren Groff, and Rumaan Alam. Remembering a stray life lesson he’d heard from an author—that “no one will ask you to write a book” —Alam takes the mantra one step further: “No one will ask you to write, full stop. It’s up to you. You probably already knew that, which is why you’re trying to produce 1,000 words a day right now.”

At Bomb, Rebecca Schuh interviews Larissa Pham about her new essay collection Pop Song. Pham talks about freelancing and the “filler economy,” trolling the MoMA archives, and respecting differences of taste: “People should enjoy what they want. I don’t have to like it and I don’t have to pretend to like it, that’s the tradeoff. And I also think it’s important to stay true to both of those things. Not be a judgmental bitch but not sell out your own taste. Taste is one of the only things about ourselves that we can really count on to know ourselves.”