Names and faces
■ Oprah Winfrey has chosen 19-year-old Leila Mottley’s “Nightcrawling,” a debut novel about a young Black woman from East Oakland, Calif., and her battles with poverty, racism and the police, as her next book club pick. Mottley said she was “absolutely floored when Ms. Winfrey popped up” during what she thought was an ordinary publishing meeting. “It was the surprise of a lifetime!” she said. A spokesperson for Winfrey said Mottley is the youngest author ever selected for Oprah’s Book Club, founded in 1996. “It brings me great joy to introduce readers to new authors, and this young poet Leila Mottley wrote a soul-searching portrait of survival and hope,” Winfrey said Tuesday. Born and raised in Oakland, Mottley was the city’s youth poet laureate in 2018. Her book was published Tuesday and has won praise. Kirkus Reviews called “Nightcrawling” a “lovely and poetic” evocation of an “underclass and the disposable women just trying to survive.”
■ The former Breitbart editor, far-right commentator and conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has a new title: summer intern for U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. Yiannopoulos announced that he had “finally been persuaded out of retirement,” saying in a Telegram post Monday that he was hired for an “unpaid internship with a friend.” He attached a photo of a congressional intern ID badge, on top of a Louis Vuitton bag, showing he’s an intern in Greene’s office. Greene said in a statement: “So I have an intern that was raped by a priest as a young teen, was gay, has offended everyone at some point, turned his life back to Jesus and Church, and changed his life. Great story!” An outspoken rightwing promoter of conspiracy theories, Greene, has praised conversion therapy, a disproved practice that attempts to repress or reverse the sexuality of gay and lesbian individuals. Yiannopoulos told the right-wing religious publication LifeSite News last year that he was now “ex-gay.” Yiannopoulos is “opening a clinic in Florida for men plagued by same-sex attraction,” according to his Telegram profile. Yiannopoulos resigned from his job at the far-right Breitbart News in 2017 after a video surfaced that appeared to show him condoning pedophilia. He said it was not perverted to be sexually attracted to a child as long as they had hit puberty. Greene has amplified numerous conspiracy theories, including allegations that Democrats are a “party of pedophiles.”