The passwords we use say a great deal about us and often have elaborate histories. At the New York Times, a story about these “tchotchkes of our inner lives” that commemorate what is important to us—“a motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar.”
Laura Poitras has received the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for her reporting on the NSA and Edward Snowden. Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!,” received a lifetime achievement award.
New York Magazine has rolled out a series of “pop-up blogs” that run for a month on a specific topic—like, say, relationships or the art world. The blogs are funded by a single source who approves the theme but doesn’t have any oversight over content. A recent pop-up, “It’s Complicated,” was funded by the TV show “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.”
Starting in January 2017, all recipients of funding from the Gates Foundation will be required to publish their research in open-access journals. The point, the Foundation says, is to “enable the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research.”
Ordinarily, URLs are made with keywords so that they will show up on Internet searches. Most of Buzzfeed’s traffic, however, comes from social sharing. Buzzfeed’s most recent trick to get people to share their posts is the “social URL”—custom URLS made by Buzzfeed writers and embedded with jokes or puns.
In a profile of Arundhati Roy, the Guardian gives a lot of airtime to criticisms of the writer—that she is a “dilettante,” a “literary tourist”; that her latest book is “shrill.” But, as always, she comes off as self-possessed and impassioned. Bookforum published a conversation between Roy and Siddhartha Deb earlier this year.