Leslie Jamison lists her favorite books about drinking. “They aren’t chronicles of the way many people can drink,” she explains, “but stories that have made me feel less alone in the way I used to drink: desperately, repetitively, often gracelessly, delivered constantly back into the dingy storeroom of the self.”
Don DeLillo talks to The Guardian about his next book, the national news cycle, and the difference between writing novels and plays.
“If you stay home, count yourself among the hundreds of thousands now being disenfranchised by the relentless parade of restrictions that Republicans everywhere are imposing and enforcing,” writes New Yorker editor Roger Angell as he implores readers to vote in the midterm elections today. “If you don’t vote, they have won, and you are a captive, one of their prizes.”
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan looks at how the press has failed to improve their coverage of Trump in the lead-up to the midterms. “We’re more careful about tossing around predictions based on our none-too-savvy interpretations of public opinion polls. . . . We’ve made fact-checking President Trump into a necessary cottage industry. And we’ve gotten over our hesitance to use the L word — lie — about his escalating falsehoods,” she writes. “But there’s still one overarching problem: Too many journalists allow Trump to lead them around by the nose.”
“The media exists in a climate of unprecedented hostility. The relationship between the White House and the press, frequently rocky, has devolved into a circumstance in which the president of the United States has referred to us as the ‘enemy of the people.’ Trump’s attacks are facilitated by the fact that, in the past two decades, trust in the media has plummeted,” writes Jelani Cobb at the Columbia Journalism Review on the importance of newsroom diversity. “At least some portion of that distrust is a product of people who rarely see themselves or their stories depicted in the media they consume. A great deal must be done to rebuild public trust. But it can begin by including the voices of all Americans. The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people.”