Benny Johnson, the Buzzfeed staffer who was fired for plagiarism this summer, has been hired as a social media director at the National Review.
At the New York Review of Books blog, Masha Gessen has posted an interesting essay about Russia’s recent population dip. In the past two decades, the number of people has fallen by almost seven million people (5 percent). The main cause is lower life expectancy. But why are Russians dying at an earlier age now than they were during Soviet rule? Is it violence, vodka, “lack of hope”?
Poynter points out an error in the New York Times’s Joan Rivers obit. Romanesko (and the St. Peters Blog), in turn, points to an error in a Rivers obit run by the the Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times.
In the American Reader, William J. Maxwell writes about the FBI’s attempts, in the 1950s, to discourage bookstores form carrying titles that criticized the agency. The Bureau at the time apparently had significant influence over some of the big publishing houses, and kept files on a number of authors, particularly African-American writers such as A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Margaret Atwood is the first author to agree to contribute to the Future Library project, which will collect 100 titles, all of which will be locked away for 100 years and released in 2114.
Ian McEwan reflects on the court cases that inspired his latest novel, The Children Ace, including a 2000 case regarding the proposed separation of Siamese twins.
The winners of this year’s Rona Jaffe Awards, granted to emerging women writers, have been announced.