The New York Observer is ditching its iconic salmon tint and moving to plain white paper. If New York magazine’s decision to bail on its weekly publishing schedule isn’t enough to jolt the print-media landscape, come February, the Observer will lose its classic pink look as part of a larger effort, according to Capital New York, to transform the weekly newspaper’s format and give it a major image overhaul.
After reporting a story for three years and delaying its publication three times (at the request of the US government), the Associated Press finally breaks the news: Robert Levinson, an American man who disappeared in Iran seven years ago, was working for the CIA. But his mission was never approved, and it broke many of the spy agency’s most basic rules: “The AP is reporting the story now because, nearly seven years after his disappearance, those efforts [by the US government to bring Levinson home to his family] have repeatedly come up empty. The government has not received any sign of life in nearly three years.”
The director Ari Folman, who was nominated for an Oscar five years ago for Waltz with Bashir, is turning the diary of Anne Frank into an animated film.
Margaret Wrinkle has won the Center for Fiction’s 2013 Flaherty-Dunnam First Novel Prize. Set in nineteenth-century Tennessee, Wrinkle’s debut novel, Wash (Grove), delves into the relationship between a troubled American Revolutionary War veteran and a young man born into slavery. In her acceptance speech at the Union League Club on Wednesday night, Wrinkle said her book was born of her own experience, growing up in Alabama: “In a still-segregated world,” she said, “these profound relationships were not supposed to be acknowledged, so I grew up crossing racial boundaries carrying divided loyalties. And I think I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to capture the whole of that particular story.”
A Russian designer is developing a Franz Kafka video game, which is set to be released next year. According to NBC News, Denis Galanin, who turned Hamlet into a video game two years ago, is working on “a puzzle-based adventure game inspired by some of Kafka’s best-known works including The Castle, The Metamorphosis, and Amerika.”
The Millions reports that The Paris Review and the 92nd Street Y have a new collaboration going, publishing footage of their onstage author interviews online. The series kicks off with Garrison Keillor, Iris Murdoch, and William Styron. It follows an initiative by the 92nd Street Y to digitize its collection, including audio interview footage, dating back to the 60s and 70s, with Nadine Gordimer, Kurt Vonnegut, and many more.