paper trail

Pacific Standard to shut down; Phoebe Waller-Bridge working on Fleabag book

Nicholas Jackson. Photo: Terence Patrick

Model, dietitian, and Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk is publishing a book. According to the press release, A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success will be “a fount of frank and practical advice on how the choices you make in every decade can pay off in surprising, exciting ways throughout your life.” The book will be published in December by Viking.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is working on a book based on her BBC show. Fleabag: Scriptures will include scripts from both seasons of the show, which will be followed by afterwords that detail her experience creating each season. The book will be published by Ballantine this fall.

After losing their primary source of funding, Pacific Standard will shut down this Friday, editor in chief Nicholas Jackson announced yesterday on Twitter. “I’m feeling all of the emotions about this terrible news. Anger and frustration, certainly—we were repeatedly and enthusiastically told we were over-performing and -delivering up until the very end, and that we had a long-term commitment,” he wrote. “My primary goal when I joined Pacific Standard back in 2013 was to do the journalism worth doing, and to prove that you could find an active, engaged, thoughtful audience for it. By that measure, we’ve succeeded spectacularly.”

At the New York Times, Wesley Morris remembers Toni Morrison and reflects on why her work was significant to the women in his family. “Morrison made her audiences conversant in her — the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology. She made them hungry for more stew: ornate, disobedient, eerie literary inventions about black women, often with nary a white person of any significance in sight,” he writes. “The women in my family were reading a black woman imagining black women, their wants, their warts, how the omnipresence of this country’s history can make itself known on any old Thursday.”

The Guardian was able to break even last year, according to a report by the paper’s parent company.

Columbia Journalism Review and Politico look at the criticism of a recent New York Times headline that mischaracterized Trump’s response to two mass shootings last weekend. CJR’s Gabriel Snyder talks to Times executive editor Dean Baquet, who says that although the headline could have been more “skeptical” of the president’s speech, the paper’s staff are not “leaders of the opposition party.” Politico’s Jack Shafer writes that it’s unreasonable to expect the paper to take on this role. “There’s something unhinged about isolating a headline, even an infelicitous one, to urge people to end their subscriptions and demand the sacking of an editor,” he writes. “If you’re that keen on having your views parroted back to you, I doubt that any publication, no matter how partisan, can satisfy you on that score.”