Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print
On April 27, publisher W.W. Norton announced it was “permanently” removing Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape. None of them have come forward with any evidence to back up the claims.
Blake Bailey, 2011 (Photo: David Shankbone)
We argued on the WSWS that this was “a major act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights. … The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs establishment public opinion the wrong way can be denounced and dispatched in like manner.”
Stop right there: Johnny Depp in City of Lies
Credit: Alamy
They told him to get a burner phone, to cover the camera on his computer – and to watch his back. It was 2015 and Brad Furman’s efforts to bring to the screen the story of the police investigation into the killings of rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, aka the Notorious BIG, was leading the director down some dark avenues.
Out of the blue, an old colleague connected to the Los Angeles Police Department had reached out, advising that Furman proceed cautiously. Powerful people in LA didn’t want the truth about Tupac and Biggie seeing light of day. “I already knew I was going to be banging up against the police in making this movie and that’s something I had to accept in service of the truth and justice,” Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer, The Infiltrator) would tell the Daily Beast. “The threat was real since day one and I decided back then I couldn’t let anything bully me, or this stor
Last modified on Mon 1 Mar 2021 15.31 EST
Tony Stoneâs Ted K is an eerily plausible and unsettlingly mesmeric realisation of the inner world of Ted Kaczynski: that is, the private life of the âUnabomberâ, Americaâs most notorious domestic terrorist who, working largely from his primitive cabin in the Montana wilderness, killed three people and injured 22 more in a mail-bombing campaign lasting from 1978 to 1995, ostensibly in pursuit of an eco-fundamentalist crusade against all modern technology.
Staggeringly, his campaign induced the Washington Post in 1995 to publish his rambling manifesto in return for a promised cessation of bombing. Something which had seemed like a catastrophic capitulation to terror turned out to be a smart move against it, when Kaczynskiâs estranged brother recognised his writing and alerted the authorities. As ever with true-crime movies like this, good or bad, there is a strange, transgressive and slightly nauseous undertow to the