Late last month, the Goldman Sachs employee behind the Twitter account GS Gossip—which publishes comments overheard in the firm’s elevator—sold his insider’s account of Wall Street culture to Simon & Schuster for six figures. The book, tentatively titled Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, is scheduled to be released in October 2014. But there might be a problem. At the Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that the author, John Lefevre, “doesn’t work at the firm. And he never did.”
The Observer defends its recent piece about New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against claims that it’s a hit piece ordered by one of Schneiderman’s enemies, Donald Trump. Trump is The Observer publisher Jared Kushner’s father in law.
According to a Swedish newspaper that has been granted access to the papers of Stieg Larsson, the novelist and bestselling novelist believed the he knew who organized the assassination of Swedish PM Olof Palme, who was shot in 1986. Larsson believed the organizer was a Swedish ex-military officer with ties to the South African government, of which Palme was vocally critical. As The Guardian reports, “It is a compelling story and only slightly undermined by the fact that Larsson probably appears to have been wrong.”
At The Baffler, Alex Pareene looks at the evolution of the New York Times’s DealBook site. Run by Andrew Ross Sorkin (see above), the site is, according to Pareene, a “reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative—and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary.”
The AWP conference starts today in Seattle and runs through Saturday (this last day, the fair is open to the public, after an outcry from exhibitors). Roxane Gay offers a guide to the conference.