Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines Vox Media has agreed to pay a $4 million settlement in the cases of three collective-action lawsuits brought by former SB Nation “team site” workers, who were lowly paid if paid at all. Vice is expanding its audio division, with a dozen new hires and promotions in addition to hiring Arielle Duhaime-Ross, of Vox Media’s Recode, to host their upcoming news podcast. According to Kate Osborn, the company’s vice president of audio, Vice has plans to launch three other shows: one focusing on the global climate crisis, another about authoritarianism, and a third “experimental”

Marlon James. Photo: Penguin Random House, © Mark Seliger At Poynter, a story on the crisis in international reporting as a result of the pandemic: “At a time when global coverage has never been more important, the coronavirus has created a devastating cocktail of economic turmoil and heightened risks that throw the fate of foreign reporting into jeopardy.” Beginning on August 22nd, writers, actors, librarians, and young readers will participate in a read-a-thon for Ray Bradbury’s centennial. Participants include Marlon James, William Shatner, and Susan Orlean. At the New Republic, Alex Shephard diagnoses why the media is uniquely terrible

Alexander Chee. Photo: M. Sharkey At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about Cherie Dimaline, Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Darcie Little Badger, and Stephen Graham Jones—“Indigenous novelists reshaping North American science fiction, horror and fantasy.” Dimaline says: “There’s a big push now for the telling of Indigenous stories. The only way I know who I am and who my community is, and the ways in which we survive and adapt, is through stories.” In Portland, Oregon, around twenty independent journalists have banded together to report on the Black Lives Matter protests, and have been selling their footage to

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: © Scottie O Hannah Black discusses why rent strikes are so difficult to organize on a large scale, and looks to the possibilities of current efforts in cities across the country for Dissent. Tenant organizing, Black writes, “is part of a long tradition of situating politics in concrete everyday survival rather than focusing on abstract categories of law and labor, an orientation toward struggle familiar in black and indigenous contexts but often hard for mass movements to come to grips with.” At the Paris Review Daily, Aracelis Girmay revisits the work of former Maryland poet laureate

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Hal Williamson New York Times editor Jazmine Hughes is taking on a new role, in which she will be writing full time for the paper and for the New York Times Magazine. At The Believer Logger, Niela Orr writes about Whitney Houston’s friendship with Robyn Crawford. Reviewing Crawford’s memoir, A Song for You, Orr observes: “In its resistance to tell all, the book is a marvelous document of the closet, of bi-erasure, romantic longing, unrequited love, queer subtext, and textual elusiveness.” The Wall Street Journal reports on a new generation of audio content, as publications

Shruti Swamy At the Engaged Journalism Lab, a guide to how journalists and those who fund them can act in solidarity with marginalized communities. At the New York Times, A. O. Scott looks at Edward P. Jones’s intricate body of fiction, which is deeply tied to specific, real locations in Washington, D. C., and does not pander to white readers. “It might go without saying — though nothing really does — that a white reader enters Jones’s world from a different angle,” Scott writes. “What comes as news to me may strike you as a gentle reminder of something

Eugene Lim. Photo: Ning Li Yale University Press has released the stunning, birds-in-flight cover design for Susan Bernofsky’s forthcoming, much anticipated biography of Robert Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small. Ben Affleck will direct the screen adaptation of Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Amitava Kumar has been asking authors he admires for distilled, pithy writing advice. Now, at the New York Times, he has published some of the responses. Lydia Davis: “Read the masters and, at least occasionally, read them closely!” Zadie Smith: “Don’t confuse honors with achievement.” Eugene Lim, the author

Isabel Wilkerson. Photo: © Joe Henson Simon Schuster has released the financial report for the second quarter of 2020—the first such report released since Jonathan Karp took over as CEO of the publisher. The report shows that revenue fell 8 percent, compared with the same quarter in 2019, but that earnings were up 9 percent, due to “lower production and distribution costs” (digital sales, for instance, are way up). The company, says Karp, “picked its shots” in promoting books that had bestseller potential, namely John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened and Chris Wallace’s Countdown 1945. As for the

Mychal Denzel Smith. Photo: Bold Type Books NPR interviews Washington Post writer Margaret Sullivan about the decline of local news. Her new book, Ghosting the News, considers how a lack of regional journalism harms democracy. At The Atlantic, Mychal Denzel Smith—author of the forthcoming Stakes Is High—makes the case for why police reform is not enough and “Incremental Change Is a Moral Failure.” Smith writes, “I am incensed by the delusion, so prevalent among the country’s supposedly serious thinkers, that tinkering around the edges of an inherently oppressive institution will lead to freedom.” On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the

Pete Hamill. Photo: Deirdre Hamill/Quest Imagery New York City novelist and reporter Pete Hamill has died at the age of eighty-five. The Brooklyn-born author was a longtime newspaper columnist and the author of numerous books, including nonfiction titles such as A Drinking Life, Why Sinatra Matters, and Downtown: My Manhattan; as well as more than a dozen novels. When asked about his favorite city, Hamill stressed its vastness, which inspired him for more than six decades: “There’s no one New York. There’s multiple New Yorks. Anybody who sits and says ‘I know New York’ is from out of town.”

Ed Yong The Cut profiles The 19th*, a new nonprofit news organization that launched this weekend. The publication’s name references the Nineteenth Amendment, with the asterisk signifying that the right to vote was, in practice, mostly granted to white women. The site will focus on deeply reported features on politics and inequality, highlighting the stories of women who are traditionally underserved by the mainstream media. On August 5th at 8 PM EST, Kimberlé Crenshaw, N. K. Jemisin, and Saidiya Hartman will be present a panel discussion, “Storytelling While Black and Female: Conjuring Beautiful Experiments in Past and Future Worlds,”

Masha Gessen. Photo: Lena Di John Homans, frequently referred to as “a writer’s editor,” has died. A number of people who worked with him at New York magazine and Vanity Fair have paid tribute. Writes Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine: “He’s the last of a breed, a vision-quest editor: He gave you a mandate when you were going to write a story, in this sort of oracular style that was hard to describe, to motivate you. He would often say, when I was at my low ebb—tired,

Rep. John Lewis in 2006. Photo: US Congress/Wikimedia Commons John Lewis’s staff has provided the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with an essay he wanted published on the day of his funeral. “Democracy is not a state,” he wrote. “It is an act.” At the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan considers Trump’s praise of Stella Immanuel—the Houston doctor spreading COVID-19 falsehoods on Facebook and Twitter—and a new Pew research study showing that Americans who get their news primarily from social media are more misinformed than those who rely on print or other sources. Numerous literary agents have signed a letter in protest of

Kiley Reid. Photo: David Goddard 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

Maaza Mengiste. Photo: Nina Subin The longlist for the 2020 Booker Prize has been announced. Hilary Mantel, who won the prize for each of the first two volumes of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, has also been nominated for the third volume, The Mirror the Light. (No author has even won the Booker Prize three times.) Other nominees include Kiley Reid for Such a Fun Age, Brandon Taylor for Real Life, Anne Tyler for Redhead by the Side of the Road, and Maaza Mengiste for The Shadow King. At Columbia Journalism Review, Susana Ferreira writes about how the global pandemic

Clint Smith Poet and essayist Clint Smith will start as a staff writer for The Atlantic in September. Following the recent repeal of a New York state law regarding the secrecy of police disciplinary records, ProPublica has launched a new searchable database of civilian complaints against NYPD officers. The records document misconduct allegations against 3,996 active-duty officers, spanning from September 1985 to January 2020. The former staff of Deadspin, who quit last year in protest of a “stick to sports” mandate from the site’s bosses, have started a new company, Defector Media. They will begin with a podcast in

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Photo: Don Usner New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick announced in a staff memo that the magazine has hired Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor as a contributing writer and Sheldon Pearce as a music writer. Taylor, who is a professor in the department of African American studies at Princeton and the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), has been writing for the New Yorker about “COVID and its devastating effects on Black communities and the quest to transform America.” Pearce has been a contributing

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Photo: Victor Jeffreys II Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is writing a new book, The Hidden Globe, to be published by Riverhead. On Tuesday, July 28th, Indiana University’s Arts and Humanities department will continue their series of panels, “Confronting Racism,” with a session on social justice and incarceration, featuring Clint Smith, Michael Harriot, Leah Derray, Kyra Harvey, and Brooke Harris. On Wednesday, July 29th, n+1 is hosting an online discussion about COVID-19 in state prisons. The panel will feature Sarah Resnick, Anthony Dixon, Michelle Lewin, and Jose Saldana. BuzzFeed has laid off fifty of seventy-four staff who had

Cover of Polish Shadow (2006) by Rosalind Fox Solomon In Jewish Currents’s spring issue, Zoé Samudzi profiles photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon in “A Journey Into the Heart of Whiteness.” Fox Solomon, a ninety-year-old artist who has been taking pictures for five decades, often took white families as her subject. Though her work frequently captures casual, everyday scenes, they can feel disquieting. As Samudzi observes, Fox Solomon “Draws to the surface an underlying menace, making visible the violence of the purity politic and the social obligation to blood and country that cement the white family bond.” The Nieman Foundation for

E. Tammy Kim At Columbia Journalism Review, E. Tammy Kim reflects on turning away from US coverage of COVID-19 (“myopic at best and racist at worst”) and toward online “transnationally Asian” magazines published in English. “Their orientation is not so much postcolonial as anti-nationalist and internationalist,” Kim writes of outlets like Lausan, New Bloom, and New Naratif, “meaning that they’re keener to explore what’s shared between working people in say, Taipei and Los Angeles, or Bangkok and Davao City, than to ask whether Canada or Vietnam has the more capable government—a temptation of traditional journalism.” And with the Black