Elizabeth Spayd, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, will soon replace the intrepid Margaret Sullivan as the New York Times’s public editor.
As Jeff Bezos confirms his intention to build more physical Amazon bookstores, the writer Sarah Boxer, in The Atlantic, makes an oddly convincing case for reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu on a cellphone (in her case, the HTC Incredible, whose screen is “about two by three inches”): “Your cellphone screen is like a tiny glass-bottomed boat moving slowly over a vast and glowing ocean of words in the night. There is no shore. There is nothing beyond the words in front of you. It’s a voyage for one in the nighttime. Pure romance.”
Amid ongoing turmoil, it seems that the Guardian is breaking up its award-winning team of investigative reporters.
In conversation with an old writing-workshop friend, the writer Rivka Galchen describes the genesis of her new book, Little Labors: “I originally turned in an almost no space-breaks long associative essay that resembled most, I would say, the cramped handwritten notes sent to planetariums and other sorts of authoritative institutions, notes you can tell the writer feels bear an important message, but that are basically unreadable, no message gets across.”
In the New York Times Book Review, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn reviews Emma Thompson’s audio version of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” which she calls “a story strangely suited for the age of anxious helicopter parenting. It preys on the determination to keep children safe, to watch their every move, to know their inner lives.”
