Sasha Frere-Jones has quit his job as the New Yorker’s pop music critic and is heading to Genius.com; his last New Yorker column is a piece about Northwest rock heroines Sleater-Kinney. Foster Kamer considers Frere-Jones’s move, writing that it really isn’t all that surprising, while at Gawker, Leah Finnegan pleads with trailblazing start-ups to stop giving Old Guard journalists so much money.
Charlie Hebdo’s new issue will have a cartoon of a crying Prophet Muhammad on the cover.
The Nation has |http://www.thenation.com/blog/194585/nation-magazine-names-david-hajdu-music-critic#|hired David Hajdu to be its music critic|. Hajdu’s books include Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina.
Three journalists who left the New Republic during the Guy Vidra–stoked editorial flameout late last year have been hired at the Huffington Post, as Arianna Huffington aims to get HuffPo into the longform game. (Meanwhile, Cathy Park Hong, the author of Engine Empire and other books of poetry, has been named TNR’s new poetry editor.)
The Story Prize has named its three finalists for the 2014: Francesca Marciano (author of The Other Language), Elizabeth McCracken (Thunderstruck), and Lorrie Moore (Bark). The winner of the “spotlight award” is Kyle Minor’s Praying Drunk.
In a post about presidential hopeful Ben Carson’s act of plagiarism (his 2012 memoir lifted passages from a website called socialismsucks.net), Mark Krotov points out: “a politician plagiarizing his or her book just isn’t that big a deal. This is not to say that plagiarism is okay—it isn’t—or that we should hold politicians to standards different from those we demand of hack pop-science reporters. We shouldn’t. But the fact is that politicians’ books—especially their campaign memoirs—are a banal and hopeless publishing category, and no one really cares about them.”
The hackers who took over the US Central Command’s Twitter account on Monday and posted “I love you ISIS” at the top of the page are probably not actually affiliated with ISIS.
