Journalist and policy analyst Ezra Klein is leaving the Washington Post to “start his own venture.” The Times reports that Klein, who runs the paper’s Wonkblog, recently approached publisher Katharine Weymouth to discuss launching a new, WaPo\-backed website “dedicated to explanatory journalism on a wide range of topics beyond political policy.” Weymouth and the the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decided not to support the venture, so Klein is setting out to start the site elsewhere—and taking two Wonkblog staffers with him. As Bookforum editor |about:blank|Chris Lehmann| quips: “At last—a Buzzfeed for smug wonk meritocrats!”
Not to be outdone, the Washington Post has meanwhile announced that it will partner with the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog about law and public policy.
At the New York Times India Ink blog: a chat with Jonathan Shainin about subcontinental foreign correspondence.
About four years ago, a journalism professor named Ted Gup found a first edition of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) in a used bookshop in Washington DC. He bought it, read it, wrote about it, and now he has donated it to the New-York Historical Society.
Writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo to Jaipur festival: American literature is “massively overrated.”
The German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel is scaling back its English edition.