New York Magazine runs a seven-page profile of Chris Hughes, the 29-year-old Facebook co-founder and recently seated owner of the New Republic. While his mission for the magazine isn’t totally clear yet, he does intend to be more hands-on, and to distance himself from his internet roots. “Hughes wants to produce what thoughtful people ought to read,” writes Carl Swanson, “as opposed to churning out what most people like to ‘like.’”
Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only magazine The Daily has folded. Alexis Madrigal speculates about why the virtual general-interest magazine never managed to get off the ground.
Is Zoe Heller’s New York Review of Books essay on Salman Rushdie’s biography—which she claims is suffused with "an unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting"—the literary hatchet job of the year? The Guardian weighs the case.
Turns out that story about an Oxford English Dictionary editor deleting thousands of words from the OED was wildly exaggerated. What actually happened, writes Ben Zimmer, is that “the former editor, in compiling material for four supplements to the O.E.D., had not seen fit to include everything that was in a previous supplement to the dictionary’s first edition, published in 1933, including thousands of words borrowed from foreign languages.”
Gang Leader for a Day author and Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh is under investigation due to financial dealings that transpired while he was head of the university’s social science research center.
New Yorkers: If you're free tonight, join Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio for the third installment of "Double Take," the reading series in which three sets of authors read original work about a shared experience. Tonight, Susan Daitch, Chris Beha, Richard Price, Lorraine Adams, Jennifer Gilmore and Joanna Hershon will be reading at apexart at 7.
We don’t know if you’ve been following the incredible story of tech millionaire/sex fiend/bath salts junkie John McAfee, but if not, we recommend you pick up the trail while he’s still on the lam in Belize. It’s only a matter of time before it’s turned into a book, movie, or both. VICE, naturally, is already hot on the trail.
