Jon Stewart announced Tuesday night that he’ll be leaving the Daily Show. For our editor Chris Lehmann, writing at Al Jazeera, Stewart was at his best skewering the Bush administration; since then the show has felt “increasingly rudderless.” (Lehmann may not be sad to see Stewart go, but book publicists are devastated. Stewart sells a lot of books.) Meanwhile, NBC suspended Brian Williams without pay. Should the Williams and Stewart switch jobs?
Richard Price intended his new novel to be slick and commercial and take him no more than four months to write. It took him four years. He was going to publish it under a pseudonym. Instead the byline reads “Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.” “I still have to do things for money,” he told the Times. “But all I want to do is write novels.”
PEN World Voices will focus its festival this year on literature from the African diaspora. Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is helping to organize the program.
Darpa—the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—is developing a search engine aimed at the dark web.
Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story is being made into a TV show. We would tell you more details than that if we could decode the news story announcing the fact. Apparently Media Rights Capital is “looking to Ben Stiller” for the show. Can anyone translate?
