Jeanine Cummins

On June 3, the New York Times published a very bad op-ed. By itself, this is not breaking news. The Times opinion page has long been a kind of stagnant water cooler for conventional center-left opinion, a hospice care ward for America’s remaining pleats-panted, open-collar Blairites. Sure, they’ll occasionally publish something interesting — an essay by the deputy leader of the Taliban, for example, or an admission by David Brooks that he once tried the ganja. But generally the Gray Lady’s opiners tend to be tucked in bed by nine, dreaming of the things globalization might accomplish the next day.This piece was not that. It was, first of all, written by a Republican, Sen.

Flatiron Books has canceled the promotional tour for Jeanine Cummins’s new novel American Dirt due to ‘safety concerns’. Cummins’s novel, which follows a Mexican mother and her young son as they flee cartel violence and seek asylum in the United States, is intended to spur readers’ sympathy at a time when Americans are increasingly indifferent to the plight of refugees. Instead she is the target of rancor and her book the target of censorship.‘I’ve never in my life seen this kind of public flogging,’ said novelist Ann Patchett, defending Cummins even as other writers signed an open letter asking Oprah Winfrey to rescind her endorsement.The outrage is following a familiar script.