Christopher Cox, who was promoted to editor in chief of Harper’s just three months ago, has been abruptly fired by the publisher and president, John R. MacArthur, seemingly over Cox’s support of a plan to redesign the magazine’s cover. The rest of the staff reportedly opposed the firing of Cox, who has done great work in his several years at the magazine. Roger D. Hodge, a previous editor of Harper’s who was fired in 2010 after a four-year tenure, told the New York Times that he too had had conflict with MacArthur over editorial matters, and that he warned Cox when he took the job “that he should expect to get fired eventually, but that he would probably have a few good years.”
In the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra has a biting account of the situation for writers in Narendra Modi’s India, where the novelist Arundhati Roy is now facing trial for “contempt of court.” Mishra vividly describes the ways in which “the suppression of artists and intellectuals in a formal democracy such as India manifests itself in many interlocking patterns.”
The Awl reports rumors that Gawker’s editorial union will be staging a two-hour walk-out one day next week in protest at the management’s refusal to offer cost-of-living salary increases. All the Gawker sites are expected to go dark during the staffers’ absence.
The Atlantic won Magazine of the Year at the Ellies on Monday night, and Kathryn Schulz, a poet of the present and future tenses, took the prize for feature writing for her truly frightening New Yorker piece, “The Really Big One.”
Ten thousand copies of a very real-looking parody supplement to the New York Timeswere handed out to New York commuters yesterday (including outside the Times building itself). It critiques the Times’s Israel/Palestine coverage and announces a “new editorial policy.”
