New York magazine talks to Bad Blood author John Carreyrou, whose reporting on Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes ultimately brought down the company. Carreyrou says that he understands why other publications wrote glowing profiles of Holmes and her blood-testing machine, even though it didn’t actually work. “You could make a case that maybe they should have done more reporting beyond interviewing her and her immediate entourage,” he said. “But how much is a writer/reporter to blame when the subject is bald-face lying to him, too?”
HBO recently announced that Alex Gibney has signed on to direct a documentary on Holmes’s rise and fall for the network.
Reuters reports that a court has halted the building of the Nobel Center.
Rumaan Alam talks to the Barnes & Noble Podcast about how “story of an uneasily blended family is a way of writing about nothing less than America.”
After his literary agency’s accountant embezzled $3.4 million from the agency and its authors, Fight Club writer Chuck Palahniuk says that he is “close to broke,” The Guardian reports.
The BBC reports that Arkady Babchenko, the Russian journalist said to have been assassinated earlier this week, attended a Ukrainian press conference today. At the conference, Babchenko explained that he had been working with Ukrainian security services to catch the perpetrator, who allegedly was hired by Russian security services. “I have buried many friends and colleagues many times and I know the sickening feeling,” Babchenko said. “I am sorry you had to experience it. But there was no other way.” Both Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have condemned the staged shooting. “This journalist’s reappearance is a great relief but it was distressing and regrettable that the Security Service of Ukraine played with the truth,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said in a statement. “Was such a scheme really necessary? There can be no grounds for faking a journalist’s death.”