Lucky Peach will close its website in May and publish its final issue this fall.
USA Today has hired its first female editor in chief. Joanne Lipman, currently Gannett’s chief content officer, will take on the role immediately.
The New York Times reports on the alt-right’s surprising and misguided appreciation for Jane Austen. Professor Nicole M. Wright published an article on the subject in the Chronicle of Higher Education after hearing Milo Yiannopoulos quote the first line of Pride and Prejudice. In a search of a transcript of Yiannopolous’s comments, she found many examples of similar sentiments online, which vary from seeing Austen as a “symbol of sexual purity,” a “standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture,” or an “exception that proves the rule of female inferiority.” But Wright notes that the co-opting of Austen is more insidious than online trolling. “By comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen,” she writes, “the alt-right normalizes itself in the eyes of ordinary people.” In the Times, Austen scholars came to the long-dead writers defense. “No one who reads Jane Austen’s words with any attention and reflection can possibly be alt-right,” said Elaine Bander, former officer of the Jane Austen Society of North America. “All the Janeites I know are rational, compassionate, liberal-minded people.”