ESPN has pulled the plug on its sports, pop-culture, and news website Grantland. This comes about a month after editors Sean Fennessey, Juliet Litman, Mallory Rubin, and Chris Ryan left Grantland to work on an unknown project led by Grantland founder Bill Simmons. Many have mourned the loss of the site. As for ESPN, the company itself did not seem have its heart in Grantland: “We’re getting out of the pop culture business,” a senior ESPN source told CNN.
Howard Sounes’s biography of Lou Reed was released in the UK on October 22. Reed was always considered to be cantankerous, difficult, drug-addled, erratic. But according to Sounes, he could also be far worse—paranoid, racist, and emotionally and physically abusive. Now, Reed’s former wife Sylvia Reed (now Ramos) has broken eighteen years of media silence to rebut Sounes’s book. Many of the people interviewed for the book, Ramos says, “were not capable of remembering anything they did in any given six-month period during that time, much less come back all these years later and say, ‘Oh, yes, I was there, this is what was going on.’ ” For those who are hoping for a less sensationalized portrait of Reed, both Luc Sante and Will Hermes are currently at work on biographies of the musician.
Editors Haley Mlotek and Alexandra Molotkow have announced that they are leaving the Hairpin, the website launched by the Awl in 2010.
The New York Times announced a $9 million profit in its third-quarter annual report—a profit driven significantly by digital subscriptions.
On Tuesday, November 2, at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre, A. S. Hamrah will be introducing a screening of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. We are particularly excited about this event after Hamrah’s September Bookforum essay, which challenges the Hollywood mythology that has cast Welles as an example of failure. “That Welles pursued his original vision, even as he worked in a state of hand-to-mouth auteur financing, into the ’80s looks from our vantage point like a sign of strength and integrity,” Hamrah writes.