MIT and JSTOR have convinced a federal court to delay the release of 8,000 Secret Service documents detailing the investigation that led to criminal charges against the late internet activist Aaron Swartz. The first batch of documents were supposed to be released on July 20, but thanks to the motion, they’re now expected to be ready in late August. Both organizations say that they need more time to redact the names of employees and descriptions of their computer networks. A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., approved the release of the documents earlier this month following a Freedom of Information request by Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. Swartz committed suicide last January while fighting criminal charges for releasing millions of JSTOR documents into the public domain. He was 26.
It’s confirmed: Rosamund Pike will be playing the lead in the David Fincher-directed, Reese Witherspoon-produced adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which will be released in fall 2014.
On Monday, Buzzfeed quietly launched a “Books” section, which will be the new home for its books-related content. There’s no dedicated editor for the site, and instead of book reviews, it will publish mostly lists and “book identity features” as well as works in the public domain. One example is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which was posted in its entirety on Buzzfeed in early July.
Also in Buzzfeed books news, the site has posted a list of “comp lit fails” after Stephen Colbert remarked on his show that he couldn’t wait for Buzzfeed to do a list of literary mishaps.
Margaret Eby, a Bookforum contributor, is now editing the New York Daily News's Page Views blog.
Here’s a list of all the humor pieces Woody Allen wrote for The New Republic back in the 1970s.
Junot Diaz has taken to the site Poetry Genius—an offshoot of the lyric-explaining site Rap Genius—to annotate a section of his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In the section, Diaz explains everything from bauxite mining operations in the Dominican Republic to how a chance encounter led him to coin the phrase “Glasgow-ghetto”: “Don’t know why I felt I had to put Glasgow on blast except that at Rutgers I met this sister who was in Glasgow in the late 80s doing community work and she said to me If you think we have some big families go to Glasgow and that stuck with me. And that’s the way hearsay makes it into a novel.”
