Jonathan Shainin, an editor of the New Yorker website, is moving to London to edit a new section in the Guardian’s print and online editions.
The McSweeney’s archive, which the Ransom Center in Texas acquired last year, is now open for research.
Prizes, prizes everywhere: The New York Press Club awards have been announced, with Stephen Brill winning the Gold Keyboard, the most prestigious honor. In England, the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction recognizes Eimear McBride for her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing; and in Spain, John Banville takes home the Prince of Asturias award for literature.
The New York Times has created a new “sin and vice” beat, and put the ideally named Mosi Secret on the task. (Secret’s first piece? On a secret strip club.) City Editor David Chang, who came up with the idea for the beat, “is figuring out how to direct the coverage of sin without encroaching on other beats at the paper,” the Observer reports. After all, “murder is a sin but it’s also a crime…so it’s likely that that would be covered by our other beat reporters.”
A Times editorial excoriates Amazon for its recent dealings with Hachette: “What seems clear is that Amazon is using its market power — the company accounts for about 40 percent of new books, print and digital, sold in the United States and more than 50 percent in Germany — to get the best deal for itself while it squeezes publishers, annoys its customers and hurts authors by limiting their sales.”
A short animated video re-stages a poignant conversation about happiness between Simon Critchley and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, held at the Rubin Museum of Art in 2012. “There is no pleasure that I haven’t actually made myself sick on,” Hoffman says.