Tony Schwartz In New York magazine, Gabriel Sherman—the author of The Loudest Voice in the Room—|http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/murdochs-have-decided-to-remove-roger-ailes.html#|reported| yesterday that Rupert Murdoch and his two sons are planning to get rid of Roger Ailes, the Fox News boss who has been sued by Gretchen Carlson for sexual harassment. 21st Century Fox, the network’s parent company, has recently hired a private law firm to conduct an independent review of the Ailes case. The company’s executives quickly responded to the New York article, saying that the Ailes case “is not yet resolved, and the review is not concluded,” but, as the New York

Tijen Karas reading a military statement on Turkish TV while being held at gunpoint. Late last week, Benjamin Wallace-Wells asked, “What Have the Freddie Gray Trials Achieved?” Today’s decision, to acquit Brian Rice, the highest-ranking officer charged in the case, affirms Wallace-Wells’s assertion that “whatever justice for Freddie Gray’s death looks like, it will probably not involve long prison sentences for cops.” Three more cops involved in the case are scheduled for trial in the coming months, but the lack of new evidence for upcoming trials and failure to convict in all preceding cases have legal experts and The

The front page of Le Monde Le Monde’s front page on the morning after the terrorist attack in Nice shows a man praying next to a body covered with a sheet, and the publication also ran a grim gallery of images from the scene. The Nice-Martin’s headline “Ils s’appelaient Timothé, Fatima, Brodie… qui sont les premières victimes de l’attentat de Nice?” reveals the names of the first victims of the attack, while Charlie Hebdo posted a chilling cartoon on their Facebook page showing what happens “when religious fanatics are invited to secular holidays.” The network France 2 apologized for broadcasting

Bernie Sanders is getting a book deal. The former presidential candidate announced his upcoming book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, days after endorsing presumed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. With an announced publication date of November 15, some worry that possible critiques of Clinton in the book could be leaked just in time to impact the election.

Roger Ailes Gretchen Carlson granted her first interview since filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox News head Roger Ailes. Carlson was unceremoniously let go in June, and while poor ratings have been cited by Fox as the reason for parting ways, the former host says ratings were never mentioned in the brief meeting before her dismissal. “It took 30 seconds, there was no ‘Thank you for your service of 11 years.’” New York’s Gabriel Sherman asks, “Can the Murdochs Contain the Damage From the Ailes Investigation?” Judging from Sherman’s own investigation, the answer seems to be no. Other

Sharon Dodua Otoo Louizandre Dauphin, a Canadian schoolteacher who is black, was pulled over by police after he “decided to take a drive to the Stonehaven Wharf and sit by the water . . . to pacify my mind by reading the works of Timothy Keller and C.S. Lewis.” Dauphin shared his experience on Instagram, posting a selfie of his skeptical face and writing, “Before any more Canadians get too comfortable on their high horses. . . . This week has not been easy for me. Amidst a number of personal and professional struggles, my mind has been occupied

Calvin Trillin A study of one-thousand shootings in ten major police departments found that black people experience more violence, in general, at the hands of the police than white people do: blacks are more likely to be manhandled, handcuffed, pushed to the ground, and pepper-sprayed. But they are no more likely to be shot. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” the study’s author Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard, told the New York Times. He emphasized that the results offered a partial view—more data would be necessary to compile an accurate picture of the country

Sidney Schanberg Last year the Washington Post began Fatal Force, a database that provides information about American civilians who have been killed by police, providing, when the information is available, the victims’ gender, race, and age. As of July 11, 512 deaths have been recorded. In about 40 percent of the cases, Fatal Force also identifies the officers who killed. The Guardian is maintaining a similar database devoted to Americans killed by police; its list puts the number of deaths at 571. Claudia Rankine—whose award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric pointedly meditated on racism in America and violence against

“There has been a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement,” President Obama told reporters this morning. Last night, protests over the shootings of two black men by the police erupted into violence in Dallas, where a gunman carried out a sniper attack on a dozen police officers, five of whom died. “The shootings, only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, transformed an emotional but peaceful rally into a scene of carnage and chaos, and they injected a volatile new dimension into the anguished debate over racial disparities in American

Hilde Lysiak Graywolf Press announced the winner of its latest Nonfiction Prize: Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, a collection of essays that “cogently breaks open the social, historical, medical, and spiritual aspects” of mental illness, to be published in 2017. The book was chosen by a committee of Graywolf editors and Brigid Hughes, the editor of A Public Space. Weijun will receive a $12,000 advance. She joins an illustrious group: Previous winners include Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, and Kevin Young’s The Grey Album.  Scandal rears its ugly head over at

Jonah Lehrer Libraries—New York City and nationwide—are booming, reports the New York Times. At a moment when one might expect membership to be declining due to the atomizing effects of the Internet, libraries have expanded their mission to meet a range of needs in the populations they serve. They offer exercise and coding classes; Internet access, which the U.N. just designated a universal human right; air-conditioning in the summer; entertainment for toddlers; and a safe space for the homeless. “In the 2016 fiscal year,” New York City libraries “received $360 million for operating costs, $33 million more than the

Octavia Butler Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz and won the Nobel Peace Prize, died in his Manhattan home this weekend. He was eighty-seven. The author of Night and many other books, Wiesel, writes Joseph Berger in the New York Times obituary, “more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience.” Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast, the second book in his trilogy of novels about our unfolding ecological disaster, is about to be published in the UK. The first installment, The Wake, was set during the Norman conquest and was written in a dialect partially based on

Gay Talese Gay Talese’s latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel, comes out July 12 and recounts Talese’s correspondence and encounters with a motelier named Gerald Foos, who tells Talese he spent more than two decades spying on his guests’ amorous activities through specially constructed ceiling vents. In an excerpt in the New Yorker, Talese visits Foos and dips his toe in the muddy pool of voyeurism—or rather his tie, which he claims, quite incredibly, slipped between slats of a louvered vent and nearly blew his and Foos’s cover. For his part, Foos supplied Talese with elaborate diary entries in which he details the mostly

Alvin Toffler Facebook announced that it would rejigger the algorithm of its most lucrative product. The News Feed, recently in the news itself after its editors were accused of behind-the-scenes tinkering and liberal bias, will privilege content that has been re-posted—i.e. pasted in afresh—by friends and family in your social network, over links supplied by publishers and news sites. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, now a pundit for CNN, is said to have forfeited a $1.2 million book deal with HarperCollins when he refused to divulge the specifics of a nondisclosure agreement he signed to work for Trump.

Amy Schumer On June 19, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a mock syllabus for a college course called Trump 101. This in turn inspired a number of professors to write a letter, calling the Trump syllabus “highly objectionable,” “intellectually dishonest,” and “irresponsible.” The letter points out that the CoHE syllabus has no books by writers of color, and that it “fails to include works on sexism, racism, whiteness, immigration, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or nativism.” Now, at the Public Books website, historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, who sought out advice from more than 100 scholars, have posted

Suki Kim An algorithm built to predict which books will become bestsellers has awarded a perfect score to Dave Eggers’s The Circle, a dystopian novel about a sinister Google-like company that hijacks the time and free will of its employees and the wider world. Using “cutting-edge text-mining techniques” developed by Jodie Archer, a former publisher, and Matthew Jockers, a co-founder of Stanford University’s Literary Lab, the model trawled through 20,000 novels to isolate elements of plot, character, and style that appeal to the broadest segment of the reading population. Archer and Jockers expected the algorithm to nominate Lee Child,

Lydia Davis Jonathan Coe—author of What a Carve Up!, The Rain Before It Falls, and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim—has been named “France’s favourite British author” and an officer in France’s Order of Arts and Letters. Coe is calling the honor “bittersweet,” following the Britain’s vote to leave the EU last week: “Yes, it’s a bittersweet feeling to have had this recognition from France in the week that Britain has turned its back on the rest of Europe,” says the novelist. “But it’s more important than ever, now, that British writers build a close relationship with their European readers,

Michael Herr “The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it” reads a Washington Post headline about Brexit, which passed. In response to the news, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would resign in October, and the stock market plunged. “Some British voters say they now regret casting a ballot in favor of Brexit. ‘Even though I voted to leave, this morning I woke up and I just—the reality did actually hit me,’ one woman told the news channel ITV News. ‘If I’d had the opportunity to vote again, it would be

James Baldwin’s former home in Provence Peter Manseau, the author of One Nation Under Gods: A New American History, asks: “Is Trumpism its own religion?” “Trump, a biblical illiterate, has succeeded so far because his followers believe he is a transformative figure who can bring about national salvation. In an election year full of surprises, perhaps the most surprising of all is that Trump voters are motivated by a kind of faith: They believe in the man, and in his promise that all their losing will come to end.” On Twitter, Hillary Clinton has revealed herself to be a

Dan Brown A Hispanic man, identified only as “Miguel,” came forward as a lover of the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen to claim the attacks were less an expression of radicalized Islam than a grudge against gay Latinos. “This crazy horrible thing he did, it was a revenge,” said the man, who wore a mask and had his voice altered to appear on Univision. “I told the FBI, if you’re a terrorist and you really want to kill a lot of people, you don’t go to Pulse. . . . He hated gay Puerto Ricans for all the bad things they