The British education organization Pearson, which sold the Financial Times last week, has confirmed that it plans to sell its 50 percent stake in The Economist magazine. According to Politico, “Existing Economist shareholders led by John Elkann, heir to the Italian Agnelli industrial fortune and a member of the magazine’s board, are working on a potential buyout of Pearson’s stake.” If that plan falls through, “one option under discussion is for an investment bank to purchase the remaining shares to allow Pearson to cash out.”
Don Winslow’s The Cartel, which came out in late June, is a novel about the drug wars in Mexico, and features a subplot that seems to have predicted kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s escape from a maximum-security prison. The book’s timeliness has caught the attention of the film industry: Fox has outbid numerous other studios for the film rights, and Ridley Scott is set to direct an adaptation of Winslow’s novel.
The Poynter Institute is planning to launch an international fact-checking organization in 2016, starting with grant money from the Omidyar Network and the National Endowment for Democracy. The organization will produce a website to help fact-checkers around the world, and will also host an annual summit.
Carrie Brownstein lists the ten books she “couldn’t live without.”
For the most recent Studio 360, Kurt Andersen interviews Mary Jo Bang about her new poetry collection The Last Two Seconds, which is “full of a sense of impending environmental collapse: natural disaster, extinction, climate change, and cataclysmic violence.”