At Literary Hub, Kristin Iversen talks to Hilary Leichter about capitalism, the gig economy, and what inspired her to write her new novel, Temporary. “I was teaching in an undergraduate program, and I was tutoring five different people, and I had a temp job during the day. . . . I realized that everyone around me was sort of in this same position and we were all just spending all of our time racing around—for what? We were just trying to stay afloat,” she explained. “I wrote it before the election in 2016, and then I edited it after the election. And it’s like that saying, ‘Write drunk, edit sober,’ only it’s: ‘Write under Obama and edit under Trump.’”
Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng is partnering with We Need Diverse Books to offer a stipend to two publishing interns from diverse backgrounds next summer. “As a writer of color as well as a mother of a young multiracial child, I’m grateful for all that We Need Diverse Books does to promote inclusion in publishing,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to find a way to give back for a long time. I’m proud to partner with WNDB to make an internship in publishing feasible for more diverse applicants through these grants.”
Ronan Farrow has announced that he will no longer work with Hachette after one of the company’s imprints chose to publish Woody Allen’s upcoming memoir, the New York Times reports. “Your policy of editorial independence among your imprints does not relieve you of your moral and professional obligations as the publisher of ‘Catch and Kill,’ and as the leader of a company being asked to assist in efforts by abusive men to whitewash their crimes,” he wrote in an email to the publisher’s CEO.
ViacomCBS is planning to sell Simon & Schuster.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was originally set to retire after the 2020 election but was forced out early, the Washington Post reports. “Each time he went on air . . . he was at risk for saying something that was not okay,” one anonymous employee explained.
At Columbia Journalism Review, David Roth looks at the overwhelming, intrusive ads that clutter online content. “Even on the websites of august institutions ads interrupt the text every two paragraphs; ads follow you down the sides of the page like store security; ads pop up in boxes that resist being closed, the elusive little x evading your cursor,” he writes. “Not all of these sites are as hard up as they appear, but all of them—the authentically desperate and the merely thirsty, the ones trying heroically to sell their way out of a downward spiral and those blithely steering into it—have made the same choice. Which is to look and feel and be more friendly to advertisers than readers.”