After bargaining for almost two years, the Gimlet Union has reached a deal with Gimlet Media.
“Nostalgia is a sneaky curator,” writes Leslie Jamison at the New York Times, in an essay about the fantasy of “the Before Times.” For Jamison, Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia is useful: “While restorative nostalgia wants to recreate an idealized past, reflective nostalgia interrogates the very image it longs for. Restorative nostalgia is drawn to monuments; reflective nostalgia to ruins.” Jamison’s essay is part of a series, “The Week Our Reality Broke,” about a year of living with the threat of COVID.
At Columbia Journalism Review, Mary Retta talks with journalists, editors, and publishers about the question of paywalling pandemic coverage and public safety: “Lowering paywalls was ethically sound. But it now raises important questions for media outlets: How long can they afford to keep their journalism free? And how will they determine which reporting is ‘essential’ to the public?”
For the New York Review of Books, Evan Kindley looks at how recent literary scholarship violates “the taboo on character talk, denying or at least calling into question the broad assumptions that governed literary-critical ideas about character for most of the twentieth century.”
Poets & Writers has an early preview of the cover art for James Hannaham’s forthcoming book of writing and images, Pilot Imposter, which is being published by Soft Skull Press this fall. Accodring to the publisher, the book draws on “the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and the history of air disasters . . . to investigate con men, identity politics, failures of leadership, the privilege of ineptitude, the slave trade, and the nature of consciousness.”
HBO Max is planning a new TV series, Enjoy Your Meal, based in part on Ryan Walker-Hartshorn’s experiences at Bon Appétit, where she worked as an assistant to editor Adam Rapoport. Rapoport resigned this summer after a photo of him in a racially insensitive costume was found and said to be part of a larger pattern of racial discrimination at the magazine.
Next Tuesday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the National Book Foundation host author Sigrid Nunez for a discussion of her work. In the Fall 2020 issue of Bookforum, Christine Smallwood reviewed Nunez’s latest novel, What Are You Going Through: “Unlike other authors, especially young ones, Nunez is never embarrassed or burdened by her characters’ knowledge; her narrators are aware but not self-aware in such a way that hobbles them. She doesn’t feel the need to apologize for their learning. They are, to use a word that used to be a compliment, intellectuals. Female intellectuals.”