Slate welcomes Julia Turner as its new editor in chief. Turner is taking over from David Plotz, who held the position for six years. She won’t be making any drastic changes, she says: “David and I have worked so closely together, so harmoniously and for so long, that the magazine as it is reflects much of my thinking.”
On Monday, David Mitchell posted three dozen tweets, the first installments in his Twitter short story, "The Right Sort," narrated by a teenager on Valium.
The Feminist Times failed to raise enough money from a recent crowdfunding campaign to remain in operation, it has announced on its website. The online magazine, started by Charlotte Raven and launched last October, has published Camille Paglia, Laurie Penny, and Annie Sprinkle, among others. Raven said that folding was, under the circumstances, “the boldest and best move.”
In October, Oxford University Press will publish Knowledge, by Jennifer Nagel, as the 400th title in its excellent Very Short Introductions series. The elegant little digests have sold over seven million copies worldwide, and are often written by pillars of the field. Highlights include Mary Beard on classics, Peter Singer on Marx, Simon Critchley on continental philosophy, Jonathan Culler on literary theory, Germaine Greer on Shakespeare, and Hermione Lee on biography.
The National Literacy Trust and public art promoter Wild in Art has piously commissioned artists to create fifty benches across London “painted to look like pages and scenes from famous books.”
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, son of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., has been named “senior editor for strategy” at the paper.
American Psycho the musical will premiere stateside at Off Broadway’s Second Stage, on the heels of a run at London’s Almeida Theatre. The UK production, starring Matt Smith, aka Dr. Who, received mixed reviews. The Guardian praised Smith’s “beautifully defined performance as the deluded hero,” but the Telegraph, unimpressed, called it an “empty mixture of ironic style and sudden moments of violence.” Apparently we can expect “a lot more BLOOD!!!” from the American production of the show, and an electronic score by Duncan Sheik that expresses the “soullessness” of Patrick Bateman. The show will open in New York in March of next year.
