Feminism, Womanhood, and Celebrity

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

This week, Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at , won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism ( took home a bunch of too). Sophie’s work has long circled the way women are depicted in pop culture, and her all explore the constraining categories that movies and television shows and celebrities propagate and, every once in a while, try to subvert. I’ll read anything by Sophie, but I particularly enjoyed her of Mary Gabriel’s new biography of Madonna. The pop star’s life and changing persona have been “an exercise in reinventing female power,” Sophie writes. “That people are still arguing about her—over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic,