An upcoming exposé by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine has Roger Ailes’s lawyers denouncing the writer to the Daily Beast. “Gabe Sherman is a virus, and is too small to exist on his own, and has obviously attached himself to the Ailes family to try to suck the life out of them,” Marc Mukasey told the news site. “Roger is fine and doing well, and is not going to allow a virus like that to poison the atmosphere.” Susan Estrich, the feminist attorney who surprised everyone by taking the Ailes case, said that the forthcoming article “is Gabe Sherman’s last stand, and it falls flat.” At least this time around Ailes’s spokespeople aren’t hiding behind anonymity.
Even after removing the biased parts of their trending section, i.e. human editors, Facebook can’t escape the critical eye of the Washington Post. The newspaper will be compiling trends from the social media site every hour and analyzing them in a daily email. “Are these trends an objective reflection of what’s happening in the world — or do they have their own algorithmic slants? Honestly, we don’t know … yet!”
A Columbia Journalism Review report says that even though Vice relies on freelance writers, producers, and fixers all over the world to create content, they also have a habit of not paying them. Yardena Schwartz, a journalist based in Tel Aviv, began collecting stories of other freelance journalists burned by Vice after a story she had worked on for three days was cut due to an editor’s family emergency, and the company offered her only a fraction of their previously-settled pay rate. “Out of 25 people I spoke to, emailed with, or interacted with through Facebook, three said they had a positive experience freelancing for Vice.”
Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, has been sued by Hachette for turning in a book that the publisher says is “not original to Smith, but instead is in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work.” The suit does not name the book that the new manuscript relies on, nor does it explain why appropriating public domain works other than Pride and Prejudice is unacceptable.
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson will release a book with HarperCollins imprint Broadside. Common Sense for the Common Good: Libertarianism as the End of Two-Party Tyranny will be published as an e-book at the end of September, with plans for a hardcover version in the spring.
Looking for a beach read in time for the holiday weekend? Goldman Sachs has you covered.
Sam Lipsyte introduces an excerpt of Annie DeWitt’s White Nights in Split Town City: “It’s almost a sacrilege to put words in front of her words. . . . This novel wants to hurt you in just the way you want art to hurt, and it also wants to slay you, the way art just wants to fucking slay you. And it will.”
