The Huntington Library in San Marino, California has acquired the archive of artist and author Eve Babitz, who was a fixture of the LA art scene in the 1960s and ’70s. She is the author of Slow Days, Fast Company, Sex and Rage, and other cult classics, and died at the age of seventy-eight last year. According to Babitz’s younger sister, Mirandi Babitz, “When I told Eve that The Huntington was very interested in her archive, she said, ‘I would love to be with Blue Boy and Pinkie again, like when we were kids. It’s as classy as the Beverly Hills Hotel so I know I’ll be happy there.’” For more on Babitz, see Kaitlin Phillips’s essay on Eve’s Hollywood and Melissa Anderson’s review of a biography by Lili Anolik in Bookforum.
Next week, Jewish Currents is hosting a conversation on “Criticism as a Creative Form” with New Yorker literary critic Parul Sehgal, art writer Zoé Samudzi, and Los Angeles Review of Books editor Sarah Chihaya. Nathan Goldman will moderate the discussion, which is free to attend at 6pm EST on Wednesday, March 16.
Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards will read from their work on Thursday, March 17, before the winners are announced at 7pm EST. You can register to attend here.
At The Nation, Liliana Frankel talks with journalist and fixer Jorge Nieto about the situation of reporters working in Mexico. Five members of the press—two of whom were Nieto’s colleagues and friends—were assassinated in the country during the first six weeks of 2022. Nieto is now working remotely from Australia, where it is safer for him to comment on the “culture of impunity” stoked by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and other state leaders.
In the latest episode of Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, Daniel Denvir talks with Sophie Pinkham and Nick Mulder about the origins of the war in Ukraine, how sanctions are being imposed and their ramifications, and Ukrainian, Russian, European, and American public opinion of the conflict.