The cartoonist Charles Barsotti died yesterday, at the age of eighty. Barsotti drew nearly 1400 cartoons for the New Yorker over the course of fifty years.
Gawker Media graduated the first class of its “Recruits” program, which trains new writers and pays them a $1500 monthly stipend, plus extra money based on how many clicks they can generate ($5 for every 1000 “uniques,” or unique visitors). Eight of the first eighteen recruits will be hired on full-time.
“The written word has been dying for so long!!” Rivka Galchen exclaims at the New York Times. “You’ve read this argument before. Then we say that kids these days, they never read—they never read!—or, kids these days, they heart reading, and their tweets are Wildean epigrams, and Kanye West is a god of language . . . although that’s not written language, it’s . . . sometimes we get lost, it’s difficult to stay on point in conversation, especially because a terrible death blow was dealt to conversation, by literacy.”
At the Guardian, Olivia Laing on alcoholic female writers, whose numbers include Jean Rhys, Jean Stafford, Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, Anne Sexton, Carson McCullers, Dorothy Parker, and Shirley Jackson.
An informal association of female writers and editors has sprung up on Facebook and Twitter, gathering under the aegis of a “binder full of women writers.” Want to commission or pitch someone in the binder? You’ll find a Twitter list here.