The Spanish writer Ana María Matute has died. She was 88. Matute was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize. Her last novel, Family Demons, is due out in the fall.
John Cheever’s Westchester house is on the market. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom house, which was built in 1795, is for sale for $525,000.
The New York Times ends “The Lede” blog. Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Poynter that the paper has been “moving away from blogs in the past year.” In fact, “almost half” of the paper’s blogs will soon close or merge.
Twitter is trying out a new feature that will allow users to control the content of their retweets.
The Atlantic explains how to write in shorthand.
Over the weekend, Pando fired two editorial staffers, David Sirota and Ted Rall, apparently in response to concerns from investors that the site featured “not enough tech and too much politics.”
Jack Shafer considers the future of Vice Media, which is valued right now at somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion. Vice’s niche—”frank and exploitative takes on drugs, murder, sex, war, jail, violence, disaster and the crazed” —isn’t exactly new, as Shafer points out. It’s been doing well “since the invention of media in the 16th century.” But the closest comparison to be made for the company is the “flash press,” which in the mid-19th century “competed for the attention of the young, urban male audience with outrageous and libidinous tales.”
