Citing concerns over “office space,” the Washington Post has announced plans to close nine of their eleven regional bureaus sparing only the Virginia and Annapolis newsrooms.
At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Maria Bustillos and David Roth debate whether David Foster Wallace “prefigured the voice of blogs,” shaping how people write online.
Russia’s richest man and former Yukos oil CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky has begun writing prison dispatches: “Khodorkovsky begins his column with the grisly tale of Kolya, who disembowelled himself and threw his intestines at guards for being set up for a crime he did not commit: grabbing a purse from an elderly woman.”
Julian Assange has accidentally leaked hundreds of thousands of WikiLeaks’ unreleased State Department cables. Without this secret cache, John Cook argues, Assange “is little more than a poorly groomed blowhard under house arrest.” In Bookforum's spring issue, Cook wrote how Assange’s persona has always been his Achilles’ heel.
In what’s becoming a depressing annual tradition, the Seattle Public library will close between August 29 and September 5 to save $650,000 from its $50 million budget.
At the New York Review of Books blog, Charles Simic wonders whether boredom still exists in the internet age.
Glossing Dick Cheney’s memoir: He claims he’s a good chef, he once got out of interning for Ted Kennedy by strategically deploying a few martinis, and he felt really bad about shooting his hunting buddy (etc.)
