Tricia Romano, whose oral history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice is out now, has written a remembrance of writer and editor Joe Wood, who wrote for the paper and many other publications before his disappearance in 1999. “He was on a public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stanley Crouch type of path,” says Colson Whitehead, who worked for VLS, the Voice’s literary supplement, before he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist. “It was always much more serious than the stuff I felt I was doing and admirable in that way.”
On Friday at 6:30, the New School will host a forum on “the role of radical politics in publishing,” which will feature Natasha Lewis (Dissent); Lisa Borst (n+1); Waldemar Oliveira (Hammer & Hope); Charlie Lee (Harper’s); Arielle Angel (Jewish Currents); Max Fox (Pinko); Edward Ongweso Jr (Logic(s)). Max Moorhead (Reservoir Journal, Woodbine) and Natasha Lennard (CPCJ, The Intercept) moderate. Wine will be served.
In the first edition of a new column, “Objects of Desire,” in the Yale Review, Catherine Lacey writes about a household object that holds a special spell over her: “When I was thirty-one and in the midst of a necessary but excruciating demolishment of my personal life, I noticed that my previously sane appreciation of glass jars with well-fitting lids had taken on a vexing emotional sheen.”
The new episode of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics is out now, with a conversation between Merve Emre and Sophie Pinkham.