20 percent nicer,’” as Re/Code puts it, they’ve picked one of their old guard, Alex Pareene, former editor of Wonkette and a survivor of First Look Media’s ill-fated Racket. John Cook, Gawker Media’s executive editor, proclaimed his excitement that Pareene would take over in time to make the most of a 2016 presidential race that “promises to be nothing short of a terrifying circus.”
Vox and Buzzfeed have seemingly helped embarrass the SXSW festival’s organizers into reinstating and expanding its planned discussions about online harassment (which they’d tried to cancel after a brief burst of targeted online harassment).
A writer explains why “experience” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be (after all, staying in bed and writing was good enough for Proust).
Blob-like, The Atlantic is expanding and taking over National Journal’s former turf in Washington, DC. Among other things, this news gave Erik Wemple the chance to journey down memory lane, recalling the good old days of Washington political coverage, when cash was everywhere. National Journal was once one of several subscription services, and an employee of one such told Wemple that, in the late 1990s, “Everyone at Roll Call got $20,000-plus bonuses. People were crying in the hallways.”
Things sound pretty bad for both literary journals and the floods of writers who now pay for the privilege of submitting work to them.
McNally Jackson Live, a regular “highbrow variety show,” begins tomorrow night, when Jeanette Winterson and Vivian Gornick will be on hand to entertain you—and every week from now on promises “someone unexpected doing some unexpected thing.”
