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'Notorious RBG' biography in the works will be co-authored by blog creator

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (File photo by Sam Kittner)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has forthrightly and humorously embraced her blog-given, hip-hop-based alias “Nortorious R.B.G.,” is the subject of an upcoming biography based on that meme.

The Tumblr blog Notorious R.B.G regularly publishes updates like one on Tuesday linking to a Washington Post story that informs us that singer Sheryl Crow is a “Ruth Bader Ginsburg fangirl.”

The biography, to be titled Notorious R.B.G.: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will be co-authored by that blog’s creator, Shana Knizshnik, and MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon. The project will combine reporting, feminist history and photography in an unobjective and irreverent celebration of the justice’s life and role in the women’s movement, Carmon told New York Magazine’s blog The Cut. Ginsburg thus far has no official involvement in the book, but she is apparently soon meeting with one of the authors.

The blog was created in the summer of 2013 (and was just listed in the ABA Journal’s 8th Annual Blawg 100), and Ginsburg mentioned it in a July interview with Katie Couric. “I will admit that I had to be told by my law clerks, what’s this Notorious,” Ginsburg said.

Carmon told The Cut the Notorious R.G.B. meme stems from the lack of “unapologetically fierce” women like Ginsburg in powerful positions and of Ginsburg’s increasing outspokenness.

“As the court has moved to the right and undone a lot of what R.B.G. and her generation fought for, she has let loose in a way that really resonates online, where people are frustrated about many of the same things,” Carmon told The Cut.