Melville House is rushing publication of the newly released Torture Report. The 480-page book will be available December 30.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of The Guardian, is leaving the newspaper. He’s been in the role for twenty years.
Nick Denton has fired himself as president of Gawker.
The Believer website has an interview with Claudia Rankine, whose recent book, Citizen, was nominated for the National Book Award. “If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake,” Rankine says. “You should admit, ‘What I said was racist and that is really unacceptable.’ You don’t say, ‘Get a sense of humor.’ And you don’t say, ‘Grow up.’ The problem is not only that the blow is dealt. The blow is dealt, and then the brown or black person is told that the blow wasn’t a blow.” Parul Sehgal reviewed Citizen in our new issue.
In the annals of pictures beating words: Instagram has reached three hundred million users, surpassing Twitter, which has 284 million.
At the Washington Post, Marty Peretz, the former editor and owner of the New Republic, wrings his hands over the demise of his old magazine and mourns its argumentative spirit: “This is not the magazine I passed down.” Leon Wieseltier, who just stepped down as literary editor of TNR, agrees—naturally—about the virtues of disagreement. He says so at the Jewish Review of Books, praising, specifically, the “|At%20the Jewish Review of Books, |argumentative Jew|.” “The most common understanding of disagreement, in the private sphere and the public one, is that it represents a failure,” Wieseltier asserts. “It does not.” Meanwhile, Ta-nehisi Coates points out that TNR “regarded black people with an attitude ranging from removed disregard to blatant bigotry.” Attitude-wise, the magazine’s publication of parts of The Bell Curve weren’t the exception but the rule.