Afghanistan expelled New York Times journalist Matthew Rosenberg, and then issued a statement calling Rosenberg’s recent article about an electoral crisis in the country “more of an espionage act than a journalistic work, one that was meant to create panic and disruption in people’s minds, and provide the basis for other spying purposes.” As the Times reports, the Afghan government was apparently “infuriated” by Rosenberg’s reporting on the possibility of “forming an interim governing committee” as a way of handling the crisis—“a step that would amount to a coup.”
At the New Inquiry, a defense of looting: “The history of the police in America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening white people’s property rights. When, in the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren’t acting non-politically, they aren’t distracting from the issue of police violence and domination, nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.
The Huffington Post has partnered with a large media company in India, with which it plans to launch Huffington Post India later this year.
Hearst is starting a free weekly magazine. The first issue of TrendingNY will come out September 8, with a print run of 50,000. It hopes to target “millennial women with interests in fashion and beauty” with its “quick, easily consumable content.”
A German culture and media minister speaks out against Amazon: “Market power and domination over central distribution channels should not endanger our cultural diversity.”
Edward Mendelson on the letters of Ernest Hemingway: “Hemingway’s deepest wish, concealed by his self-asserting mask, was to become one with someone or something else, to live without the burden of a self.”