Some three-and-a-half weeks after Mehta’s death, the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf has appointed Reagan Arthur, currently senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, to succeed him as president and editor in chief. While few people knew this before the announcement, Arthur was Mehta’s own choice for the job. – Los Angeles Times
Tag: 01.23.20
PBS News Anchor Jim Lehrer Dead At 85
“While best known for his anchor work [as co-founder of what is now The PBS NewsHour], which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.” – The New York Times
Does Russia’s New Minister Of Culture Hate Culture?
Her blunt views on culture were summed up in a 2008 blog which complains “I simply can’t stand going to exhibitions, museums, opera”. – BBC
Smithsonian To Send Popular Obama Portraits On A National Tour
Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald’s painting of the first lady, like the Obamas themselves, broke boundaries. L.A.-born, New York-based Wiley and New York-based Sherald were the first African American artists to be chosen by the National Portrait Gallery for such commissions. – Los Angeles Times
How Ice-T was a mensch
“One of my happiest moments, in my years as a journalist, was when I got Ice-T to stop saying something homophobic and cruel in his live shows.” – Greg Sandow
What Professional Book Critics Think About Amateur Reviewers And Academics
Philippa Chong asked them. “Critics were understandably ambivalent towards amateur reviewers despite their appreciation for general readers’ enthusiasm about books. … If the critics I interviewed were concerned that amateurs did not bring enough analysis to their reading or lacked credentials to speak to a book’s artistic merit, they had equal concern … that literary scholars couldn’t always ‘code-switch’ to make their specialist form of criticism accessible to general readers looking for a straightforward review.” – Literary Hub
Hysterical Critics, Public Writing, And Making Sense Of Things
Hysterical critics are self-centred – not because they write about themselves, which writers have always done, but because they can make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way round… What seems self-evident to me is that public writing is always at least a little bit self-interested, demanding, controlling and delusional, and that it’s the writer’s responsibility to add enough of something else to tip the scales away from herself. – London Review of Books