Karl Miller, a founding editor of the London Review of Books, has died. He was eighty-three. Johnson edited the LRB for ten years, plus another three with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the current editor. The Guardian calls him the “greatest literary editor of his time, and one of the greatest ever.”
At Open Culture, you can watch Allen Ginsberg’s lectures on the literary history of the Beats. Ginsberg delivered the talks for a summer course at the Naropa Institute in 1977.
Gawker got its hands on Vice’s style guide. “Avoid corny colloquialisms like bucks, smackers, or samoleons,” the guide instructs. Also: “A handful of websites are actually becoming legitimate, respected news outlets; some might even call them ‘online magazines.’ On a case-by-case basis, we will italicize those. For example: ‘The Huffington Post ran an interesting rebuttal to an essay from the LA Review of Books, but Gawker made fun of both of them because those guys are mean.'”
The New York Times Magazine is looking forward to an extensive redesign in 2015, Capital New York reports. In the meantime, we’ll see a few changes to the lineup. A handful of regular front-of-book and back-of-book sections will be killed, though The Ethicist and a weekly Q&A will remain, and the feature well will now include four rather than three pieces a week.
A choice quote from a profile of James Frey at the Wall Street Journal: “I want to prove them all wrong. . . . I want to make everybody who hates me give up.” Next week, Frey’s “media empire” will release the novel Endgame, accompanied by a YouTube channel, 50 social-media accounts, a video game, and a puzzle, the first solver of which will be paid $500,000 in gold coins.