The last episode of the popular podcast Serial has been released. The final show does not, as most listeners hoped, provide any firm answers about the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999. Dwight Garner calls it a “tangled and heartfelt yet frustrating hour of radio.” A public defender, writing in the Washington Post, says that the show missed an opportunity to show something important about the criminal justice system. “I don’t know whether Syed is innocent,” Sarah Lustbader says, “but he was clearly convicted despite many reasonable doubts.”
Gawker got its hands on a document from Vice Media that lists employee salaries. The document was submitted earlier this year in order to qualify for Empire State tax incentives. If the media company weren’t allowed to relocate to Williamsburg, it threatened, it would move to LA. As Hamilton Nolan points out, the numbers are based on 2013 salaries, and it’s impossible to know how accurate they are. But the gap between writers and everyone else is blazingly visible: Average pay for editorial staff is listed at $45,000; average pay for business and sales staff is very nearly twice that.
MacMillan has struck a deal with Amazon that lets it set the pricing on e-books. The retailer will take a cut of the sales.
Secret Behavior is a year-old art and sex magazine that's more about intimacy than sex. Its mission, says founder James Gallagher, is “embrace the human experience completely.”
Janet Maslin, Michiko Kakutani, and Dwight Garner name their ten favorite books of 2014. Our favorite list is Garner’s, which includes Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Marilynne Robinson, Leslie Jamison, Hermione Lee, Atticus Lish, and Caitlin Moran.
Poynter has collected some of the best—i.e. most ridiculous—corrections of the year. A mistake by the Washington Post that must have been among those that caused the most personal trouble for its subjects: “An earlier version of this story erroneously said that Joaquín Guzmán was found in bed with his secretary. He was found with his wife. This version has been corrected.
