At the New York Times, Alex Marshall talks to Val McDermid, a judge for this year’s Man Booker Prize. “We all agreed if any of us absolutely hated a book, we wouldn’t put it forward,” McDermid said of the judging process. “But we’re there to find a winner, not personal taste. We’ve all lost books that we loved along the way — that spoke to us in a very personal way, maybe due to our experiences in life or the place where we were.” McDermid and the four other judges meet today “in a secret location” in London to decide this year’s winner.
The Guardian has awarded its 2018 Not the Booker prize to Rebecca Ley for her novel Sweet Fruit, Sour Land.
For their pop-up blog Executive Time, Kara Swisher tells Slate about her best and worst bosses.
The majority of San Francisco magazine’s editorial staff have quit their jobs, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Although the publication recently won a National Magazine Award, parent company Modern Luxury had recently announced plans for “unspecified budget cuts.”
“So what happened to The Outline?” asks Laura Hazard Owen of Joshua Topolsky’s struggling website. “Did it try to make the good shit and stumble by mistake into cheap shit? Did it overestimate how unique its editorial voice actually was? Or has it faced the same set of roadblocks the rest of the digital media industry has, only without much goodwill from all those cheap-shit producers?”
