The Economist has hired Zanny Minton Beddoes as editor. Formerly the business affairs editor, she’s the first woman to be in charge at the magazine.
The New Yorker rounds up its coverage of authors named as 2014 NBCC award finalists (announced Monday), including work by Blake Bailey, Roz Chast, and Elizabeth Kolbert; reviews of Claudia Rankine, Marilynne Robinson, and John Lahr; and criticism by Alexandra Schwartz.
The NYPD is more closely monitoring the city’s media outlets in the wake of recent attacks in Paris.
At Artforum, John Ashbery remembers the painter Jane Freilicher, who died last month at the age of 90. Jane was the first person Ashbery met in New York. “Her pictures seem to have come into being all by themselves—almost. The painter sort of showed them how to do it and then returned to her other work—fixing lunch, maybe, opening the mail, and coming back to check on the picture and make sure it hasn't gone off the rails. The resulting creations look unfinished and incredibly strong.”
ISIS is supposedly working on a TV channel, to broadcast news 24/7. An Arabic-language teaser appeared last week advertising a channel called the Islamic Caliphate Broadcast. It has since disappeared.
The journalist Barrett Brown has been sentenced to sixty-three months in prison, after pleading guilty to a variety of charges related to his involvement with the hacking group Anonymous. In a statement to the court, Brown said he regretted having hidden computers from FBI agents and having made videos that threatened an agent who was investigating him. He said he had compromised his role as a journalist when he got in touch with a security firm with an offer to redact material from a 2011 hack, in order to distract the focus from the hacker Jeremy Hammond. But Brown's expressions of regret, The Intercept reports, came alongside "sharp rebukes of the federal government and the private security firms targeted by the hacks."
