Apple executives, who are not known to voice strong opinions on anything that isn’t bezel-related, say they much prefer the new unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs to Walter Isaacson’s authorized (and unflinching) 2011 book, Steve Jobs.
Now that senator Ted Cruz is officially a candidate for president, how should mainstream journalists handle his assertion that climate-change science is phony? At the journalism blog Press Think, NYU professor Jay Rosen considers the four ways that publications can handle the climate-change deniers’ position and how they might balance impartiality with the idea that facts matter.
We were surprised to see tweets reporting Chinua Achebe’s death Monday morning, since we had a distinct memory of his passing in 2013. Apparently, many people on Twitter (including US national security advisor Susan Rice) saw the March 2013 New York Times obituary and thought the writer had just passed away. Rice deleted the tweet that said it was a “somber day in Nigeria” and replaced it with one noting it was, at any rate, a good occasion to remember Achebe—and reminding readers to always “read fine print.”
The second annual Folio Prize for fiction has been awarded to Akhil Sharma for his novel Family Life.
Tonight in New York: At McNally Jackson Books, novelist Rivka Galchen will talk to the shockingly prolific Argentine writer Cesar Aira about his new book, The Musical Brain and Other Stories. (In 2011, Galchen wrote for Harper’s Magazine that Aira’s works are “like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful.”) And Elif Batuman will read and discuss her work at Baruch College.