President Barack Obama will be the guest-editor of Wired’s November issue, on the subject of “Frontiers.” “When the Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they were at the bleeding edge of Enlightenment philosophy and technology,” said Wired editor in chief Scott Dadich. “We want to wrestle with the idea of how today’s technology can influence political leadership. And who better to help us explore these ideas than President Obama?”
Despite rampant speculation about Trump’s plans to launch a media project after losing the general election, Bloomberg says it might take more money than the candidate has. “It’d be an expensive move for a man who has famously run a low-budget presidential campaign.” The Washington Post has digitized a large amount of source material from its recent book, Trump Revealed, including financial documents, court filings, and interview transcripts.
Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji, who was sentenced to two years in prison after a reader claimed that a sex scene in Naji’s The Use of Life “made his blood pressure drop and his heartbeat fluctuate,” has lost his motion for appeal of his sentence.
Although Facebook just dismissed its entire New York-based editorial team, Poynter thinks that the website should hire some fact checkers to oversee its trending topics section. But fact checkers would be editorial employees, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this week that Facebook is “a tech company, not a media company.” A former Facebook editor spoke with Digiday about working on the platform’s trending section. The site claims that the human editors were teaching the algorithm how to perform, but the computer was a poor student: “If you’ve used the tool in the last few days, you’d realize that the algorithm didn’t learn shit.”
The Nobel Prize medal of mathematician John F. Nash, the subject of Sylvia Nasar's book A Beautiful Mind (later a film), will be auctioned this fall at Sotheby’s. The projected price of $2.5 to $4 million may prove the current command “of scientists over literary types in the rarefied market for some of the world’s most difficult-to-acquire gold jewelry.” By contrast, William Faulkner’s medal did not sell in 2013 after bidding reached only $425,000.
Lena Dunham announced a new collection of short stories in her newsletter yesterday. Best and Always will be published by Random House next year. Read her newest story, “The Mechanic,” at Lenny Letter.
“Book ninjas” in Melbourne, Australia, have been stealthily leaving books on trains and bus lines “in a subversive attempt to bring reading back to workers' commutes.” Although one usually becomes a ninja by birth, anyone can become a book ninja by requesting stickers from co-founders Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus.
