Joshua Rothman introduces a new “blog about ideas” at the New Yorker.
Never mind books, it’s time for the World Cup! Some vaguely literary world cup coverage ahead of the tournament next week: John Cassidy at the New Yorker, and Simon Critchley at Roads & Kingdoms.
Capital New York reports that the law firm Outten & Golden, which has sued Condé Nast, Hearst, and other media companies for using unpaid interns, may be filing a class action lawsuit against Vice. A few former interns received letters from the firm notifying them of the investigation. Vice began paying interns $10 per hour last year.
@Everyword, an automated Twitter feed that since 2007 has been dutifully tweeting every word in the English language, has come to the end of the road.
On Wednesday, Stephen Colbert sent thousands of people to the Powell’s Books website to buy a debut novel by Edan Lepucki. The plug pushed the book, California, to the top of the independent bookstore’s bestseller list, and briefly caused the website to shut down. “I don’t think historically we’ve ever had one single moment in time when this many people have arrived at the site to shop,” the store’s marketing manager said. Colbert’s publisher is Hachette, the company that has been in a dispute with Amazon. Salon approvingly crowned Colbert “the next Oprah.”
Tests confirm that a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de lame, owned by the Houghton Library, is bound in human skin. The catalogue note describes the binding as “taken from the back of the unclaimed body of a woman patient in a French mental hospital who died suddenly of apoplexy.”