Good morning. Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, a publication he co-founded, because, he claims, the editors “censored” an article on Hunter and Joe Biden:

‘The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,’ Greenwald wrote in a blog post.

“‘[T]he brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the ‘intelligence community,’ to suppress its revelations — eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying.’

The editors at The Intercept claim that the article had problems, which Greenwald refused to correct. Its editor in chief, Betsy Reed, wrote that  “Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor.”

Greenwald has published the offending article here and his exchange with the editors here. He discusses his resignation here. Matt Taibbi provides the play-by-play with color commentary:

Greenwald insisted he wasn’t planning an overwhelming amount of coverage but wanted to do a single article, reviewing the available facts and perhaps asking the Biden campaign to comment on the veracity of the Post story. Reed agreed that he should write a draft, then they could ‘see where we are.’

An aside: when reporters and editors interact, they speak between the lines. If an editor only ever suggests or assigns stories from a certain angle, you’re being told they don’t particularly want the other angle. If your editor has lots of hypothetical concerns at the start, he or she probably won’t be upset if you choose a different topic. Finally, when an editor lays out ‘suggestions’ about things that might ‘help’ a piece ‘be even stronger,’ it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through.

Reed explained that any piece Greenwald wrote on the Biden/Burisma subject would have to go through ‘the editorial process and fact-checking that we do with any story with this kind of high profile.’ Peter Maass would edit, but Reed also noted that there was a lot of ‘in-house knowledge’ they could all ‘tap into.’

By ‘in-house knowledge,’ she meant the work of Robert Mackey and Jim Risen, two Intercept reporters with whom Greenwald clashed in the past. Risen had already loudly denounced the Post story not only as conspiracy theory, but foreign disinformation. Essentially, Reed was telling Greenwald his piece would be quasi-edited by people with whom he’d had major public disagreements about Russia-related issues going back years.

To this, Greenwald responded that this was a double-standard: when Risen wrote an article credulously quoting intelligence officials like James Clapper, John Brennan, and Michael Hayden (more on the extreme irony of this later) describing the Post story as having ‘the classic earmarks of Russian misinformation,’ he could do so willy-nilly. But when Greenwald wanted to write an op-ed piece questioning the ‘prevailing wisdom on Biden and Burisma,’ a team of people would would be summoned.

‘The only reason people are getting interested in and ready to scrutinize what I write is because everyone is afraid of being accused of having published something harmful to Biden,’ Greenwald told them. ‘That’s the reality.’

In other news: Matthew Sitman remembers the singer-songwriter Billy Joe Shaver: “I saw Billy Joe play only once, now well over a decade ago, at a small theater in Virginia. There was no opening act. Instead, his set was preceded by a screening of the documentary The Portrait of Billy Joe, which had just been released—an intimate, gut-wrenching look at the truest of all the Texas troubadours. The teaser for a profile of him published in Texas Monthly in 2003, not long before the documentary came out, gives a sense of the life that provided such abundant material for the filmmakers: ‘In his 64 years, the Corsicana native has been a cotton picker and a roughneck, a screwup and a scoundrel. He’s hit the bottle, hit rock bottom, and been born again. He married the same woman three times, mounted multiple comebacks, survived a heart attack onstage and the deaths of nearly everyone he’s ever loved. All of which explains why he’s one of the greatest songwriters in the world.’ One of the details missing from this description is that, when he was a younger man, Billy Joe lost two fingers on his right hand during a stint working at a lumber mill. The accident meant that, while he sometimes strummed along as he sang, more often he set aside his guitar and performed his songs—flapping his arms, punching a fist into the air, using his entire body to convey the emotion behind them.”

On Tuesday, I noted that The Strand bookstore in New York was fighting for its life and called for help. New Yorkers and others responded. Now Paris’s Shakespeare and Co. is making a similar call: “The celebrated Parisian bookstore told readers on Wednesday that it was facing ‘hard times’ as the Covid-19 pandemic keeps customers away. France is expected to impose a new four-week national lockdown as coronavirus cases continue to surge; large swathes of the country, including Paris, are already under a night-time curfew. ‘Like many independent businesses, we are struggling, trying to see a way forward during this time when we’ve been operating at a loss,’ said the shop in an email to customers, adding that it would be ‘especially grateful for new website orders from those of you with the means and interest to do so’.”

Speaking of bookstores, Steve Martin says they should only have two sections: “‘Riveting’ and ‘Kinda Boring.’” Seems like he might agree with Douglas Murray (also linked on Tuesday), who is getting tired of customers being “force-fed books that the store’s employees think will be good for them.”

Stefan Collini writes about the ups and downs of the Times Literary Supplement over the years, including Stig Abell inglorious tenure. His conclusion is: “Different readers want different things, and some tastes do, eventually, change. But it does not seem likely that the TLS could ever succeed as some mix between a glossy ‘lit’ magazine and an experimental ‘little review’ for new writing. In fact, it is hard to imagine any version of itself succeeding in the future which does not continue the attempt to straddle the worlds of academic scholarship and commercial publishing. Like it or not, many (though very far from all) of its readers are going to be academics, and a lot (perhaps practically all) of its readers, academic or otherwise, will want serious, informed reviewing of a wide range of books.”

Gracy Olmstead is starting a reading group for those interested in discussing Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Jack. Sign up here.

The art of dying in medieval literature: “The ars moriendi, art of dying, formed a medieval literary genre. Death could come suddenly at any time, so it was important to be prepared. Fifteenth-century tracts instructed the imperilled soul to repent, make a good confession and detach from worldly goods, including wife and children. But the idea of dying as an art points to something even more essential: it is a work to be accomplished, not merely a fate to be endured.”

The author Reni Eddo-Lodge demands an apology from the Spectator for suggesting that she is in favor of racial segregation: “The article includes the suggestion I am in favour of a racially segregated society. I am not.” The offending piece is an interview with Kemi Badenoch, a black MP, who says “She is particularly incensed by the boom in sales of texts such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (which claims all white people are racist and any denial of this is further evidence of racism) and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race (whose thesis is that black history has been eradicated for the political purpose of white dominance). ‘Many of these books — and, in fact, some of the authors and proponents of critical race theory — actually want a segregated society.’” It seems to me that “many” means “many”—i.e., “not all.” Spectator has so far refused to provide a “correction,” though they did invite Eddo-Lodge to write a response.

Photo: Shirakawa-go