The Guardian has hired former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (who’s postponed her plans to run a subscription-based longform journalism project producing “one perfect whale of a story” per month) as a biweekly columnist on the presidential race. She’s started with a piece in defense of Hillary Clinton’s probity, even though, she notes, “As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland.”
Jezebel deputy editor Jia Tolentino has a piece about Thomas Sayers Ellis, a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop who was removed from his post after anonymous accusations of misconduct were made against him, and about whether the situation has now fundamentally changed for what Tolentino calls the “important, inappropriate literary man”: “the grabby lit mag editor, the wildly volatile critic, the author you hear once hit somebody, the professor who every year dates a first-year grad student and manages to send her reputation, not his, into the mud.”
Alexandra Brodsky, one of the founders of the activist organization Know Your IX, has a depressing account of how the media deal with advocates and organizers on the subject of rape and sexual assault: “We already have an expert,” an NPR producer told Brodsky, before dropping her from a planned show. “We need a survivor.”
Bloggers and essayists feel decidedly mixed about their work being annotated via sites like Genius—“Of all the things that come out every day,” Alana Massey asks, why must News Genius staff pick on her piece about loneliness? “Why isn’t David Brooks chosen?”—and now they may be able to defend themselves with a plug-in.
Tonight at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, you can catch the Cool as Fk reading series, this time featuring new fiction from the likes of Alexander Chee and Annie DeWitt, as well as an AWP preview.