Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has donated $20 million to the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, which will be renamed after him. “Sometimes rich people want to do fancy stuff in terms of endowments: Ivy League schools, the opera, the ballet,” Newmark said. “Me? I want to help out people who, much like me, really needed a hand. If you’re lucky enough to do well, then I feel the right thing is to give people a hand, and the best way for me to do that is to help out journalism.”
The Outline has laid off the editor and staff writer of its Power section. In a statement to Fast Company, editor in chief Joshua Topolsky claimed that he had “let go of two underperforming employees—the power section here is more than intact,” but later backtracked on his statement in a tweet.
Home Fire author and Women’s Prize–winner Kamila Shamsie talks to The Guardian about immigration policy, living in London, and how it felt to have her book predict the future.
“A novelist can share a poet’s sensibility, precision, generosity, slant, view, broodiness, relationship with language, imagery, metaphor and the visual,” Caoilinn Hughes writes in her list of poets-turned-novelists at Granta. “But what about the novelists who are poets? Do their novels betray them as such?”
New York magazine’s Reeves Wiedeman examines the history of VICE, and wonders if the company can make it through slow financial growth and allegations of widespread sexual misconduct. Though office culture has changed since the New York Times investigation, some staff loyalty still remains according to recently-hired senior vice-president Marsha Cooke. “In her first address to the staff,” Wiedeman reports, “Cooke said that she heard such pride in the organization that she half-expected the room to turn into a scene from Spartacus, with each of the company’s creatives standing up, one by one, shouting, ‘I am Vice!’”
Tonight at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Lauren Groff talks to Lisa Lucas about her new novel, Florida.