Unionized workers across several Conde Nast publications are walking out today in protest of “the unlawful handling of layoff negotiations and bad-faith bargaining.” Over 400 workers are holding a work stoppage and rally today, and asking readers to respect a digital picket line of GQ, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Vogue, and other publications.

For the latest issue of the Yale Review, Greil Marcus considers “Why I Write” and what criticism means to him. For Marcus, it started with reviewing the Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed in 1969: “Why am I reacting to this so intensely? Why does this make

Leslie Jamison is beginning her book tour for Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story next month at the Center for Fiction with a launch event on February 20 featuring Mary Karr. An essay adapted from the book, “The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage,” recently appeared in the New Yorker. 

More author events: Amitava Kumar will launch his new novel, My Beloved Life, on February 26, at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location, in a conversation with Stay True author Hua Hsu. Wine will be served afterward.

At the Cleveland Review of Books, Greg Gerke offers up an essay that intertwines two

Democracy Now! reports on “Israel’s War on Journalists,” with the Committee to Protect Journalists’ preliminary report finding at least eighty-three journalists killed so far in the Isreal-Gaza war. Amy Goodman speaks with CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator Sherif Mansour as well as Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous. 

Condé Nast is laying off Pitchfork staff, including editor-in-chief Puja Patel, as it folds the venerable music site into GQ magazine. The move was widely criticized online, with New Yorker staff writer Amanda Petrusich tweeting, “Feels like a death

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mosab Abu Toha remembers poet, professor, and activist Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December: “What Refaat asked of every one of us was to tell his tale. And his tale and those of others need to change this world, need to stop the genocide. It is not fiction. It is not poetry. It is his life.” 

In Liberties Journal, Ryan Ruby writes about Marcel Proust: “Just as everything about market society seems designed to get in the way of reading Proust, reading Proust gets in the way of participating in market society.”

On the occasion

At The Baffler, the editors reflect on the “strange and surreal year” that was 2023, and look back on some of the stories they published, on the war on Gaza, revolutionary change, conversion therapy, and more. 

In the new issue of The Nation, Omari Weekes reviews Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. “Who are photographs for, anyway?” Weekes asks. “More specifically, what purpose do memorials to the victims of slavery and racism—which often employ images of Black suffering—serve, and who are they for? Throughout Ordinary Notes, Sharpe directs our attention to the ways in which we choose to

In the New Yorker, poet Mosab Abu Toha describes fleeing his home in Gaza with his family and being detained, stripped, and beaten by Israeli forces. Toha writes of the future, “I hope that when the war ends I can go back to Gaza, to help rebuild my family home and fill it with books. That one day all Israelis can see us as their equals—as people who need to live on our own land, in safety and prosperity, and build a future.”

Amy X. Wang remembers teacher and poet Louise Glück, who died in October. Glück’s friend and colleague Anita Sokolsky says of the poet, “She had a vivid and unstinting

New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen discusses the controversy over the awarding of this year’s Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now. Gessen received the prize in a postponed and scaled down ceremony on Saturday after the prize’s sponsor, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, withdrew its support in response to Gessen writing in the New Yorker that Gaza today is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.” 

At Jewish Currents, Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Isabella Hammad’s new novel Enter Ghost. The novel follows Sonia Nasir, a

For The Nation, Nadia Taha writes about the dangers faced by Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Taha notes that at least sixty-three journalists and media workers have been killed so far since October 7th; fifty-six have been Palestinian. Taha observes, “Local reporters in other conflicts around the world have been lifted up by the journalistic community. The journalists of Ukraine, for instance, were awarded a special Pulitzer Prize citation for their bravery in war. The very least that those of us can do now is bring that same level of solidarity, attention, and gratitude to the journalists of

Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer was killed in Gaza last week by an Israeli airstrike alongside six family members. TIME has published a collection of transcribed voice notes Alareer sent them last month. In one, he talks about the extreme lack of food and water in Gaza: “I personally lost like five kilos, but I don’t care. I can eat one date for 10 or 15 hours. I’m a young man. But how would you tell a kid they can’t eat, they can’t have what they want, they can’t drink enough? I keep telling my kids, ‘Drink less, eat less.’” At the Electronic Intifada, Asem al-Nabih, a longtime

The Fall 2023 issue of Bookforum is out now, with essays by Justin Taylor, Audrey Wollen, Hanif Abdurraqib, Leo Robson, Jane Hu, Michael W. Clune, Blair McClendon, Laura Kipnis, and much more. Subscribe today to support what we do, and consider making a donation or gifting a subscription. 

Unionized workers at the Washington Post are planning to strike on Thursday to protest cuts to staff and call attention to management “refusing to pay us what we’re worth or bargain in good faith.” Contract talks have been ongoing for eighteen months. The Washington Post Guild is collecting letters of

Tonight in New York, Ninth Street Studio will feature Aaina Amin, Jen Elias, Abou Farman, Sahar K., H. Sinno, and others reading The Gaza Monologues, a project begun in 2010 by more than thirty young people for the Palestinian theater ASHTAR.  ASHTAR is asking theaters around the world to perform the monologues today. The New York event is being put on by Movement Research, Performance Space New York, Mabou Mines, and Writers Against the War on Gaza. PDFs of the monologues are available in multiple languages on the Gaza Monologues site. In an entry from the original series, thirteen-year-old

In this year’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, published in The Nation, activist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd discusses Said’s 1984 essay “Permission to Narrate,” which critiques how Western coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese War was biased toward the Israeli narrative and suppressed the Palestinian point of view. El-Kurd identifies a similar situation at hand today, with Western mainstream media creating a false dichotomy in which Palestinians “are either victims or terrorists” and only deemed sympathetic if they are “perfect victims.” Countering this, El-Kurd writes: “We are human not