Univision was the top bidder in yesterday’s Gawker auction, landing the site for $135 million. The Wall Street Journal reports that founder Nick Denton will no longer be involved with Gawker after the sale goes through.
Pagan Kennedy—the author of Inventology: How We Dream Up Things that Change the World and the novel The Exes, among other books—has signed a contract to become a regular contributing writer for the New York Times’s Opinion section.
For the twentieth anniversary of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the author explained that the book “was originally written as a kind of reinvention of The Great Gatsby.” According to Palahniuk, “In the American novel, you typically have three characters. One of the characters demonstrates passivity by committing suicide, one character demonstrates the perils of being too rebellious and must be killed, and then one is the witnessing character.” Instead of trying to cram all three into one book, “the three characters would be two characters, one of which has a split personality.”
After the New York Times ran a cover story last weekend about “the failing mission to tame Donald Trump’s tongue” that relied heavily on anonymous sources, the Republican candidate and his senior communications adviser Jason Miller both said the story was false. But the Times deputy executive editor Matthew Purdy said that the paper has “not heard from the campaign beyond their public statements.” “Make an angry and flamboyant display publicly, while failing to mount a case directly to the offending news outlet,” the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple writes. “We’ve seen this before.”
The idea of a tame Trump took another blow this morning, as two right-wing media heavyweights have joined the campaign: Stephen Bannon, a cofounder of Breitbart News, has been named as the Republican nominee’s chief campaign executive, and Roger Ailes, the ex-Fox News CEO, is said to be coaching Trump ahead of the fall presidential debates.
Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett is starting a team book club. The first selection? Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. “It’s going to be pretty cool,” Bennett said.
Bruce Springsteen has posted the foreword to his upcoming autobiography, Born to Run, on Facebook. “I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud,” writes the Boss. “So am I.” The book hits shelves September 27.
Lady Gaga and her father Joe Germanotta are releasing a cookbook of recipes from Germonatta’s Upper West Side restaurant, Joanne Trattoria. Gaga will write the introduction to Joanne Trattoria Cookbook: Classic Recipes and Scenes from an Italian American Restaurant, out this November.