The Nobel Prize for Literature will not be awarded again until the Swedish Academy’s issues are resolved, The Guardian reports. Although the group has announced plans to award two prizes in 2019, Nobel Foundation executive director Lars Heikensten wrote on the prize’s website that he hopes “that this will be the case, but it depends on the Swedish Academy restoring its trust.” In a radio interview, Heikensten also urged the current members of the academy to resign. “I think everyone needs to think about whether they are good for the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize and whether they will be good for the academy in the future,” he said.
The first bid for Gawker.com was accepted yesterday. Long Island digital ad agency Didit has offered $1 million for the site, and “plans to turn the once-biting and snarky site into a ‘good gossip’ news site.”
David Sedaris tells the AV Club that he doesn’t understand why his books Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked are so popular. “Quite often a textbook will rerun something from Naked or Me Talk Pretty One Day, and I just—there’s so many better things,” he said. “I mean, those books were written so long ago, and they’re over-written in my opinion. So I could give you 20 reasons not to buy either of those books and not a single reason to buy one.”
CNN reporter Chloe Melas talks to the New York Times about her reporting on the sexual harassment allegations against Morgan Freeman, which was prompted by her own experience of harassment by the actor.
The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Cartwright explores the friendship between Donald Trump and TMZ’s Harvey Levin.
At Vox, Todd VanDerWerff explains why cancelling the highly-profitable Roseanne reboot was a good decision for ABC. “At what point do you accept that Barr is going to keep tweeting things like this, turning off a growing portion of your audience, and if that continues to happen, soon only those who are watching to hear Barr say outrageously racist things will be around?” he writes. “It hurts all those other shows by sharing space with them, and it scares off peddlers of new shows who might not want to share a network with a series whose star seems intent on chasing away everybody who isn’t already predisposed to laugh at racist tweets.”