Laura Kipnis has provoked the ire of students at Northwestern, where she teaches, with a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article criticizing policies that prohibit relations between students and professors. “I suppose I’m out of step with the new realities because I came of age in a different time,” Kipnis wrote, “under a different version of feminism, minus the layers of prohibition and sexual terror surrounding the unequal-power dilemmas of today.” In protest, about thirty students walked the campus carrying mattresses and pillows, and circulated a petition calling for a “swift, concrete and direct response from the University, affirming its commitment to its own sexual misconduct policy.”
The civil-rights reporter Claude Sitton has died at the age of eighty-nine. Sitton won a Pulitzer Prize while writing for the North Carolina paper the News & Observer, where he was the editor, but he was most known for the almost nine hundred articles he wrote while working in the South in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
The New Yorker‘s new metered paywall, which lets readers access a limited number of articles of their choosing each month before requiring them to subscribe, has increased traffic significantly, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. In January, the number of visitors to the website was up 30 percent over last year at the same time, and the number of new subscriptions was up by even more—85 percent. Total paid circulation for the magazine is 1,044,524. The metric the magazine is most interested in isn’t visitors or even subscriptions at this point, however, but rather the total amount of time that visitors spend reading. The highest numbers in that category are for “collections,” bundled stories on a theme, which readers spend an average of fifty-three minutes on.
First Look Media has named Michael Bloom as president. Bloom is a former CEO of the Guardian News & Media, North America.
Two debut novels put out by the small independent British publisher Legend Press have made the Baileys long list: PP Wong’s The Life of a Banana, and Jemma Wayne’s After Before.