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Hello, my loves (Mallory here)! Texts From Jane Eyre just made #11 on the New York Times bestsellers list for Culture, and I’m enormously pleased and also one step closer to riding Jonathan Franzen like a pony (nothing sexual, mind you. Just weird)!

nyt

I’m right below Roxane, as I always should be. It’s where I belong.


On the torture report:

Many of the most extreme interrogation methods — including waterboarding — were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration. But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in C.I.A. custody.

The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.


TNC has marshalled his thoughts on The New Republic (Mallory wound up covering this yesterday BUT LET US DO IT ONE MORE TIME):

TNR did not come to racism out of evil. Very few people ever do. Many of the white people working for the magazine were very young and very smart. This is always a dangerous combination. It must have been that much more dangerous given that their boss was a racist. (Though I am told he had many black friends and protégés.) Peretz was not always a regular presence in the office. This allowed TNR’s saner staff to regard him as the crazy uncle who says racist shit at Thanksgiving. But Peretz was not a crazy uncle—he was the wealthy benefactor of an influential magazine that published ideas that damaged black people.

A writer for TNR told me how, in the mid-’90s, Peretz would come down to the office from Cambridge and lobby young writers to write what turned out to be the fictional “Taxi Cabs and the Meaning of Work.” The writer told me that the young interns and fact-checkers would squirm in their seats. But no one took a stand. And perhaps it is too much to expect writers in their mid 20s, with editors in their late 20s, to say to Peretz, “Please stop shopping this racist bullshit.” But the task was made infinitely easier by a monochrome staff that could view Peretz’s racism as an abstraction, and not something that directly injured their families.

This is from earlier in the piece, but I think that TNC’s statement “TNR made a habit of ‘reflecting briefly’ on matters that were life and death to black people but were mostly abstract thought experiments to the magazine’s editors” is really the meat of this piece, and something that gets to the heart of how journalism can go astray and the vital importance of assigning pieces about race to POC.


christ what an asshole



yep


The Guardian talks to Ayesha Siddiqi:

I have to do a great deal of justification before I write or publish a piece: am I adding something that is truly original to the conversation? Very few people seem to share that sense of angst. When so much of your experience is erased and silenced, to insist upon it requires a great deal of daring. Even something that can feel inconsequential as an essay about pop culture can feel like a particularly audacious gesture of insistence on your personhood. Under white supremacy, the existing social environment, it will take a lot for that ever to feel natural.

What’s required online is the basic concession to our own culpability and corruption, the fact that it’s possible for me to be anti-black, since we live in an anti-black society. The value in a platform like Twitter is that I know if I mess up, I’ll get called out. I’m so grateful for that because you have everything to gain when you’re open to that critique.


Yule Cat


Canadian news.


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