On Friday, a federal appeals court decided in a two-to-one vote that Michael Lewis did not a libel a money manager in the bestselling book The Big Short, about the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The suit focused on Lewis’s chapter “Spider-Man at the Venetian,” which detailed a 2007 conversation between Wing Chau and hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman. Chau and his firm, Harding Advisory LLC, sued Lewis, Eisman, and publisher W. W. Norton, saying that the book made him and other CDOs look like “crooks or morons.”
At the Awl, Jacqui Shine offers an impressive essay on the New York Times’s much-loathed Style section, once characterized by New York magazine as “loaded with attitude, big pictures, white space—and undemanding copy.” The Style section’s history has certainly been dotted with moments of flat-footed trend-spotting, e.g. “the Grunge debacle,” in which the paper of record credulously reprinted lingo that scenesters made up as a hoax on reporters. But as much as people love to hate the Style section, Shine reflects on a more complicated history, “which encompasses the long effort of women in journalism to be taken seriously as reporters and as readers, the development of New Journalism, large-scale social changes that have brought gay culture into the mainstream, shifts in the way news is delivered and consumed, and economic consolidations and disruptions that the section has, sometimes in spite of itself, thoroughly documented and cataloged.”
Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, is interviewed at the Rumpus: “We are so hardwired to not want to be alone in what we feel, but also have a deep hunger to be exceptional and different.”
The Miami Book Fair is now under way, and its schedule of events suggests that it is quickly becoming one of the strongest literary festivals in the country, one that includes bestselling novelist, political journalists, literature in translation, and talented poets. The fair looks so promising, in fact, that PBS will be live streaming footage of the event later this week, providing what one producer calls “Olympic-style coverage.”
Margaret Atwood—who has spent her fair share of time contemplating catastrophic scenarios—gives pointers on how to survive a zombie invasion.
Media blogger Jim Romenesko reports that his former employer, the Poynter Institute, lost $3.5 million in 2013 and anticipates losses again this year.