The Freedom of the Press Foundation has partnered with Archive-It to collect the work of Gawker and LA Weekly, as well as other news outlets and websites that may be threatened by purchase “by a hostile party.”
Former Time executive editor Siobhan O’Connor is joining Medium as the company’s vice president of editorial. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Howard R. Gold looks at the history of the magazine and explains how it became “a victim of its own prosperity, which fostered a culture that discouraged risk-taking and punished failure.”
The Millions talks to Joseph Cassara about 1980s New York, the erasure of queer history, and his new book, The House of Impossible Beauties. “I always feel sad when I realize how much of queer history is lost because it hasn’t been documented properly. Or it’s been purposefully erased,” he said. “My modus operandi when writing is to try and resurrect queer stories and turn them into narratives that people can experience in a linear fashion.”
Amy Chua tells the New York Times’s “By the Book” section that if her daughters don’t write her biography, she’d choose Elif Batuman. “She’s the daughter of Turkish immigrants—and studied violin at the Manhattan School of Music—so I think she’d relate,” she said. “Also, she seems like a generous spirit, and I could definitely use that!”
At the Los Angeles Times, Agatha French goes to Mystic Journey Bookstore to ask one of the store’s twenty psychics about the future of the book industry. French was specifically interested in “what types of books, if any, people would seek out in the future.” The psychic telepathically called upon an unnamed writer for his opinion. “Respect for the spoken word is getting lost,” he said. “This level of knowledge, books and communication in the way that we’ve known it will only have value to a certain group of people.”