At Jewish Currents, Haley Mlotek talks with composer Ethan Philbrick and writer Torrey Peters about what divorce has meant for their work. Philbrick belongs to The Gay Divorcees, a musical ensemble of nine “real-life queers who got gay married and gay divorced,” and Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which she wrote following her own divorce. For Peters, reading books by cis women about divorce helped her identify the audience she wanted to write her novel for: “I was like, ‘There’s a way of seeing the world that these women seem to have.’ Which was: to take stock of yourself, to be honest about your failures.”
n+1 has published a collection of remembrances of fiction writer Anthony Veasna So by his former professors, his friends, and his fans.
PEN America has settled a lawsuit with the US government brought about in 2018 to challenge President Trump’s retaliation and threats to the media. PEN America’s CEO, Suzanne Nossel, said, “Our lawsuit . . . represents an important win for free speech, a free press, and the First Amendment. The outcome is clear: Not even the president of the United States can invoke the power of government to threaten members of the press based on their coverage.”
On NPR’s 1A podcast, Anna Malaika Tubbs talks about her new book, Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.
The New Republic’s Alex Pareene looks back on the days when Rush Limbaugh was solidly mainstream: the 1990s. “It’s a fact that Rush Limbaugh was uncancelable back in the 1990s when the newspapers politely euphemized his AIDS jokes.” In Pareene’s estimation, a certain generation of thinkers’ recent obsession with cancel culture is a reflection of their awareness of how much discourse has shifted: “Seeking to reconstruct the past may be easier than having to readjust your worldview to account for changes in conditions.”
On Thursday, March 4, the Yale Review will host Jericho Brown for a reading and discussion with Meghan O’Rourke and Roger Reeves about craft and the challenges of writing poetry today. RSVP here.