According to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, First Look will launch its first digital magazine next week. The new site will be run by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, and it will kick off with a number of reported pieces on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. First look is also announcing three new hires, journalists Marcy Wheeler, Ryan Gallagher, and Peter Maass, who recently wrote a very interesting article about Poitras and the Snowden leaks for the New York Times Magazine.
Earlier this week, The New York Observer published a scathing critique of the Times editorial page, including many quotes from unnamed sources inside the newsroom who resented, disliked, or just didn’t respect the op-ed page’s editor Andrew Rosenthal. Now the Washington Post is weighing in, taking down the takedown, with “17 Problems with the New York Observer’s Hit Piece . . . ,” mainly emphasizing that it is bad form to publish ad hominem attacks (or simply negative quotes) from anonymous sources, and noting that “one person’s pettiness and tyranny are another person’s exacting editorial standards.”
The town council of Nakatonbetsu is demanding that novelist Haruki Murakami apologize for suggesting in a story that the city’s residents are inveterate litterbugs.
At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick considers how the Woody Allen v. Dylan Farrow case is playing out in the “Court of Public Opinion.” And the Times is considering taking the unusual step of publishing a rebuttal by Woody Allen to Dylan Farrow’s now infamous open letter, published on the op-ed page last week.
Francine Prose and Dana Stevens on the marriage plot’s relevance in 2014.
New York cinefiles: We strongly recommend an event this evening at NYU’s Deutsches Haus, where Noah Isenberg and Geoffrey O’Brien—two excellent cultural critics who frequently write about film—will discuss the work of director Edgar G. Ulmer. The occasion is the publication of Isenberg’s Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, and coincides with Lincoln Center’s tribute to Ulmer’s often-bizarre work, which includes Detour, The Man from Planet X, and The Amazing Transparent Man.
The Millions highlights the best literary tweets since 2010.