Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Photo: © Don Usner Political commentator Michael Brooks has died at the age of thirty-seven. As the host of The Michael Brooks Show on YouTube, he was known for his comedy, empathy, and sharp political analysis. On Twitter, the tributes have been pouring in. At Jacobin, Bhaskar Sunkara remembers his colleague and friend: “[A] dream of a vibrant community nurturing left media was fundamental to Michael’s work. Not because he aspired to be an ‘influencer’ with a large individual platform, but because he knew how important it was to build the kind of bonds that you can’t

Rep. John Lewis in 2006. Photo: US Congress/Wikimedia Commons Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and many others are paying tribute to John Lewis, the Civil Rights leader and Georgia congressman who died on Friday. On Twitter, political correspondent Alex Burns calls attention to a passage from David Halberstam’s The Children, in which one subject interviewed states that Lewis’s words “might have well been carved in granite.” “That young man is pure of heart.” Here is a video in which a deeply moved Lewis accepts the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2016 for the graphic memoir

Michelle Obama. Photo: © Miller Mobley The Literary Arts Emergency Fund will provide $3.5 million in one-time grants to publishers and literary organizations. The fund is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was spearheaded by the Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the National Book Foundation. At ProPublica, an investigation into Facebook’s claim that they do not allow misinformation about voting on the site: “False claims, including conspiracy theories about stolen elections or outright misrepresentations about voting by mail by Trump and prominent conservative outlets, are often among the most popular

Rakesh Satyal. Photo: Dbrancazio/Wikicommons At Electric Lit, Eva Rosen offers a reading list of books on housing inequality. Rosen, author of The Voucher Promise, notes that this form of discrimination is pervasive in America and has many consequences: “Housing drives all sorts of disparities in the U.S.: health, wealth, education, employment, exposure to the criminal justice system, even happiness. Yet, where we live is no accident: It is the result of decades of laws, policies, practices that inscribed the blueprint for racial and social inequality across the nation.” Novelist and editor Rakesh Satyal has been named executive editor at

Josie Duffy Rice Namwali Serpell looks at photographer Ming Smith’s portraits of Afrofuturist poet and musician Sun Ra, and the challenges of their work. “These two artists dare us to reimagine black identity—that is, human identity—from the groundless ground up, as an order of being that stutters in and out of nonbeing, that dissolves and gathers itself and others, in turn, in time. Did Sun Ra truly believe he had once been transmolecularized to Saturn? Did he really want to save black people by sending them to outer space? Was he some kind of intergalactic Marcus Garvey, who sold

Damon Young. Photo: Sarah Huny Young According to the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column, Donald Trump has now made more than 20,000 “false or misleading” public statements. At the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood has written a diary about living with and through the coronavirus: “When I examined my history, I found the following search: insane after coronavirus? coronavirus made me insane? This can’t be entirely blamed on the illness. A few years earlier I had indulged in a similar query: insane after book deal? book deal made me insane? Other search strings of interest were: ‘Christy Turlington,’

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Grove Atlantic The Columbia Journalism Review is hosting a series of discussions with Black journalists about systemic racism in newsrooms. One of the participants, Wesley Lowery, observes, “there’s been a noticeable uptick in ‘Hey—could you give this a glance?’ notes that we’ve gotten from colleagues in recent weeks. And, to be clear, almost every black reporter I’ve ever encountered is eager and happy to help, but . . . there is very little appreciation of the real labor involved in being every person in the newsroom’s ‘black friend.’” Austin Channing Brown talks about her memoir,

Yiyun Li. Photo: © Phillippe Matsas Discourse about The Letter published by Harper’s Magazine has been fast and furious. Gabrielle Bellot provides some much-needed context and perspective. The New York Times Magazine has a special fiction issue inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century classic, The Decameron. In her introduction, Rivka Galchen notes the parallels between Boccaccio’s plague-ruined era and our own: “Boccaccio writes that during the Black Death the people of Florence stopped mourning or weeping over the dead. After some days away, the young storytellers of his tale are finally able to cry, nominally over imaginary tales of tragic

Thomas Chatterton Williams. Photo: Dominique Nabokov Nan A. Talese is retiring later this year after a six-decade career in publishing. Talese first started working in the literary world in 1959, as a copy editor at Random House—later becoming the publisher’s first woman literary editor—and has worked at numerous houses since, founding her own imprint at Doubleday in 1990. Margaret Atwood, whose The Handmaid’s Tale was acquired by Talese, said of her longtime collaborator and friend: “No editor has seen so many changes and done so much in publishing as the legendary and much beloved Nan Talese, known fondly to

Raquel Willis At Forbes, Janice Gassam rounds up black businesses to support today for Blackout Day 2020. During the blackout, you can use Gassam’s list to purchase wine, kettle corn, coffee, clothes, and, of course, books: The list includes Elizabeth’s Bookshop Writing Centre, a literacy center and store focused on celebrating marginalized voices. Nick Estes writes about the role disease has played in the mass killing of Indigenous people in the US, challenging the popular consuseus that the deaths were the result of “invisible, chance forces” such as old-world microbes that Indigenous people were not immune to: “When confronted

Ibram X. Kendi. Photo: Stephen Voss At The Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist—reflects on what the Fourth of July meant in 1776 and what it means now: “As we know all too well today, wealthy white American men did not stop rebelling when they won the American Revolution, when they gained the power to protect their declared independence. They continued to rebel to keep their power. They, ‘the Patriots.’ The rest of us have continued our rebellions because we

Tressie McMillan Cottom. Photo: The New Press Eve L. Ewing on why she capitalizes the “W” in the word White when talking about race: “Whiteness is not only an absence. It’s not a hole in the map of America’s racial landscape. Rather, it is a specific social category that confers identifiable and measurable social benefits.” Tressie McMillan Cottom—author of Thick and Lower Ed—considers how the COVID-19 pandemic is making people uncomfortably aware of class in America: “The white consumer is fighting for their very lives, as they experience them. If they are not consuming, then they may not exist

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Chris Close The New York Times talks to editors, executives, writers, booksellers, agents, and publicists about what it’s like to be Black in the publishing industry. Vice has a deep dive into recent troubles at the Los Angeles Times. The story centers on the tenure of executive editor Norm Pearlstine, who was hired by a new owner in 2018 to revive the flagging paper: “His two years at the Times have been marked by success as well as failure; and his failures are not his alone, but those of an institution that has struggled to overcome

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Photo: © Sameer A. Khan Tonight, Cornel West will talk to Eddie S. Glaude Jr. about his new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. The event is co-hosted by Haymarket Books and Labyrinth Books. Laurence Ralph—author of the recent book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence—presents a new short documentary, The Scars of Being Policed While Black. Yesterday, a collective of trans media professionals launched the Trans Journalists Association. Their website has a style guide for editors, writers, and reporters, and resources for employers. A court has

Robin D. G. Kelley The podcast Intercepted hosts scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, who talks to Jeremy Schall about Trump’s Tulsa rally and the 1921 race massacre, racial capitalism, defunding the police, and the Third Reconstruction. Kelley observes how the trope of the “outside agitator” has distorted and weakened a genuine movement: “There’s a way in which Trump and his ilk can take the idea or the fear of the outside agitator and flip it to vilify those who are genuinely fighting for social justice and for an end to policing and ignore, completely ignore if not justify the

Aaron Robertson In an article titled “How the Trump Campaign Is Drawing Obama Out of Retirement,” New York Times reporters Glenn Thrush and Elaina Plott offer some insight into the current state of the former president’s next memoir. In a package deal, Random House bought the memoirs of Michelle and Barack Obama’s memoirs in 2016 for $56 million. Michelle’s Becoming arrived in 2018. The publication date for Obama’s book is not yet set. According to the article: “The book’s timing remains among the touchiest of topics. Mr. Obama, a deliberate writer prone to procrastination—and lengthy digression—insisted that there be

Sasha Bonét. Photo: Jeremy Grier The first episode of Diversity Hire, a new podcast (and newsletter) about being a “person of color” in media, is out now. Yesterday, the New Yorker Union undertook a half-day work stoppage to demand a “just cause” provision in their contract. The union stated that employees “will not participate in the production or promotion of content for the print magazine or the website,” from 9am to 1pm and reserve the right to take further action if management doesn’t adequately respond. At The Cut, Claire Lampen details “What We Know About the Killing of Elijah

Amia Srinivasan. Photo: Nina Subin In the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan examines the history of gender-neutral pronouns: “What words mean and which words exist is not up to any single person. But it is up to us, collectively. When an individual refuses the application of a word that applies, by the rules of public language, to them, or when an individual applies to themselves a word not yet in the public lexicon, they are making a move that they hope others will take up—and that will, in turn, change how they are seen and treated by others.

Octavia E. Butler. Photo: Nikolas Coukouma/Wikicommons President Trump’s younger brother has taken legal action in an attempt to block the publication of a tell-all book by the president’s niece, Mary L. Trump. In the New York Times opinion section, Wesley Lowery looks at the question of objectivity in the media and the ways in which white ideas and opinions are considered “neutral.” Lowry calls for a new standard of fairness and truth-telling: “instead of promising our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias . . . a better pledge would be an assurance

Angela Davis. Photo: Columbia GSAPP/Wikicommons At The Cut, Gabrielle Bellot looks at the case of Breonna Taylor and asks, “When Will Black Women See Justice?” It has been 101 days since Taylor was shot to death by police, and, so far, only one of the three officers has been fired and none have faced criminal charges. Bellot examines the ways in which violence against Black and Brown women is portrayed in the media, and notes that when women speak out against these injustices, they are chided for not doing so properly: “We are asked why we did not speak