Money, money, money. Yet another rumor emerges that Michael Bloomberg is keen to buy the New York Times, this time for a smooth $5 billion, McSweeney’s asks its fans for $150,000 on Kickstarter, and Vice Media looks set to pull in $1 billion in revenue this year.
Meanwhile, the venerable Onion has its own grand designs. Quoting Farhad Manjoo’s observation a couple of years ago that “now, more than ever, the Onion is in the same boat with the rest of the media” in terms of online pressures, the Atlantic notes that while that’s still true, they’re also “several steps closer to buying a yacht.”
At The Intercept, a new investigation by Ryan Devereaux of what happened to the 43 in Mexico, accompanied by Keith Dannemiller’s photo essay from Omeapa, where three of the missing students came from.
Till the end of May, middle- and high-school students can enter a food-themed essay contest as part of Chipotle’s Cultivating Thought project. Winners get $20,000 toward their college fund, and to see their musings on the same fast-food wrappers that have borne the words of Jonathan Safran Foer (who’s helping judge the prize alongside Like Water for Chocolate author Laura Esquivel), Toni Morrison, and George Saunders.
While beginning-middle-end still seems like a winning formula for stories, Aeon has a piece reminding us what a historically specific one it is, and how the “sprawling, untidy, infinite... multi-directional” narratives of serials, immersive theater, and above all, gossip, are the kind we’ve all loved for much, much longer.
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s fourth novel and apparently the only one aside from Slaughterhouse-Five the author would have graded A-plus, has been optioned for television.
