Al Gore has sued Al Jazeera, claiming that the news provider, owned by the Qatari Royal family, has failed to pay the full amount agreed upon in the purchase of Gore’s network, Current TV.
Medium, the website of “stories and ideas” and serious journalism founded by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, has announced that it will make public its followers and what articles they read at the site. “Medium is in a grey area between platform and publishing,” Selena Larson writes, and goes on to argue that revealing what people read is an infringement on readers’ sense of privacy and curiosity.
The Awl has announced that it has hired Haley Mlotek, a writer and the publisher of the fashion journal Worn, to edit the Hairpin.
Rembert Browne—a staff writer for Grantland—has written an evocative, firsthand report of the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown. “A man sitting near me was the first person I saw start to run. Then, suddenly, we were all running. I remember looking over my shoulder as my legs churned beneath me. The police were shooting flares and I didn’t want to get hit in the back. But I didn’t stop running, because I didn’t want the smoke to catch up. There was also the sound of weapons firing. And this siren. This terrible, terrible siren...” At the Times, David Carr writes: "Ferguson, Missouri, was just a place—a working-class suburb of St. Louis—before an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by the police, before protests and looting erupted, before local forces responded with armored vehicles, tear gas and rubber bullets, and Ferguson became #Ferguson." And at the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb files a report titled "A Movement Grows in Ferguson."
Reading a recent Guardian article that explains why the British love to hate Martin Amis, Emily Temple felt envy. Why, she wonders, can’t American writers inspire such strong feelings? Are they too nice?
