G/O Media has ordered Deadspin writers and editors to not write about any subject besides sports, the Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reports. Deputy editor Barry Petchesky was fired “for refusing to hew to the edict.” The company has also removed a post by Deadspin staff complaining about new auto-play, sound-on ads featured on the website. Writer Kelsey McKinney has posted a screenshot of the article to Twitter. “This isn’t what any of us signed up for,” one employee said of the new ads. “It’s amateurish and pushing longtime readers away and making the sites difficult to enjoy.”
John Heilemann and John Battelle’s new political video project, The Recount, has raised almost $10 million in funding, Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo reports.
At New York magazine, Reeves Wiedeman looks at “what’s left of Condé Nast” after editor Graydon Carter’s departure and publisher Si Newhouse’s death.
For the Paris Review, Marit MacArthur analyzes John Ashbery’s poetry reading voice.
Literary Hub ranks the ten best essay collections of the 2010s, including work by Hilton Als, Rebecca Solnit, and Valeria Luiselli, among others.
Call Me by Your Name author André Aciman talks to Entertainment Weekly about music, fruit, and his new book, Find Me. “I had no idea that the peach scene was going to become so important. I was going to cut it out because I had a fun time writing it and I figured, okay, my editor’s going to say, ‘Shame on you André, we’re not going to put this in.’ In fact, he said the opposite,” Aciman remembered. “I had no idea that there were going to be fans — there’s a group of readers called the Peaches. There are 22-25,000 of them around the world and they tour to Italy every year. They’re having a big event in June of 2020 to which I was invited.”
