The FCC has published, in a three-hundred-plus-page document, its new net neutrality rules, which reclassify the provision of high-speed internet as a telecommunications rather than an information service. The rules mean that the agency will be taking a more active role in regulation, something that broadband providers such as Verizon are likely to try to combat.
“Every stage of life longs for others,” Andrew Solomon said to his audience at this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. “When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.”
Buzzfeed plans to open a newsroom in Toronto later this spring.
At the NYRB blog, Tim Parks thinks about the effect of success on novelists—“Imagine you are Karl Ove Knausgaard at this point in his career”—and concludes that a change in the work, not to mention the writer, is unavoidable. “Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer reflects that through expressing them he has realized his inevitable and well-deserved triumph. The lean years of patient toil when no one paid attention may even begin to seem preferable to the present. The very thing you created in the heat of fierce concentration has destroyed the circumstances that made it possible. The writer is devoured along with his books.”
Heck, a new (print) literary magazine out of Portland with a long list of estimable contributing editors—among them Wells Tower, Jen Percy, Tom Bissell, Darcey Steinke, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, D.T. Max, Kyle Minor, Benjamin Percy, and Evan Smith Rakoff—is looking for funding on Indiegogo. The first issue is set to appear this spring.
The state of Alabama has concluded that there was no evidence of fraud in the recent deal struck by HarperCollins to publish Harper Lee’s second, long-buried novel, Go Set a Watchman. According to the Associated Press, “Lee answered questions to an investigator’s satisfaction, so they closed the file.”