Via Small Spiral Notebook, there’s an important PEN event this Wednesday:

The Writer’s Conscience: Remembering Anna Politkovskaya & Russia’s Forgotten War
 
When: Wednesday, December 6 @ 7pm
 
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
 
“An evening of reading from Anna Politkovskaya’s work and a conversation about the costs of an ongoing but forgotten war.”

Musa Klebnikob, Kati Marton, Dana Priest, David Remnick, among others will feature in the night’s event. I am itching for the opportunity to hear Remnick speak on the subject. He was the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union. The New York Review of Books features a review of his Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker. It is an outstanding overview of the book’s contents as well as Remnick’s approach to reporting and attitude toward his subjects. [NYRB:] “A Far-Flung Correspondent.”

In other news, a blogger hearts Malcolm Gladwell (“the work’s gone all sparkly”) and has gotten terribly behind on reading the magazine (“the blasted things just keep coming and coming, and i keep picking them up out of the mail pile and stashing them at the bottom of the magazine pile because i’m determined to fight my way through the whole wretched mess without cheating or skimping or missing anything”). Meanwhile, ex-New Yorkerite Garrison Keillor hearts Christmas.