Bob Woodward A list of English-language books from Osama bin Laden’s private library in his compound in Pakistan has just been declassified. Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward is on it, as is Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival. Foreign Policy notes that on this evidence bin Laden appears to have been a Francophile (“Among the materials acquired in the 2011 raid were the 245-page clunker Economic and Social Conditions in France during the 18th Century”), while Politico asks several of the authors on the list to imagine what he might have got out of reading their books. Several outlets have
László Krasznahorkai The Hungarian author of Satantango, László Krasznahorkai, has won the biennial Man Booker International Prize in recognition of his body of work. Just as ”now we say, ‘it’s just like being in a Kafka story,’” Marina Warner, the chair of judges, said, “I believe that soon we will say it’s like being in a Krasznahorkai story.” As well as the £60,000 award, there is a £15,000 translators’ prize that will be split between Krasznahorkai’s translators, Ottilie Mulzet and the poet George Szirtes. Daily Mail North America’s CEO, Jon Steinberg, tells us who he thinks is really “killing
Finalist Maryse Condé After much anticipation, the winner of the Man Booker International Prize will be announced today. The New Yorker publishes a letter from Norway: Karl Ove Knausgaard on Anders Behring Breivik. AWP has removed Vanessa Place from its 2016 Los Angeles subcommittee in response to outrage over her use of text from Gone With the Wind and a picture of Hattie McDaniel as Mammy on Twitter (this is apparently part of a long-term project for Place). Coming just months after Ken Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown”, which reappropriated parts of Brown’s autopsy report, drew similar accusations
Sarah Ellison According to recent article in Variety, the Times is actively searching for a new media columnist to replace the recently deceased David Carr, and has put together a list of leading candidates that includes Jonathan Mahler (a Times writer and the author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning), David Folkenflik of NPR, and Sarah Ellison, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, Matthew Kassel at the Observer has put together a list of seventeen more writers he thinks would do a good job. Jillian Goodman, an associate editor at Fast Company, has started a Kickstarter
Anton Chekhov Buyers of Peter Schweizer’s much discussedClinton Cash on Kindle have been alerted to a new version of the book, now available with several “significant revisions” to correct factual errors. Online life becomes a little less of a free-for-all—after its influx of investor cash last year, Reddit had already tightened up its rules on nude photos, and now it introduces an explicit anti-harrassment policy, allowing users to report other Redditors and the things they post to staff who can have them removed. The announcement has been seen as interim CEO Ellen Pao’s move to make the site less
Sabrina Rubin Erdely After long drawn out, semi-shadowy negotiations, the New York Times will today begin a partnership with Facebook to publish stories directly into its news feed. NBC News and others apparently plan to follow suit. “How does the Times protect the independence of its journalism,” asks Gabriel Sherman, “say, if the paper runs a hard-hitting investigation on Facebook?” As the late David Carr wrote last year when the social network was holding talks with publishers about how best to work together, “Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often
From the cover of Hard to be a God, first US edition A 10,000-word piece by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books has caused a major stir—it tells a story about the killing of Osama bin Laden four years ago by Navy SEALs that has little in common with the version espoused by the US government. Among other things, the piece, which uses several anonymous sources, asserts that Pakistani authorities knew bin Laden’s whereabouts all along, that the US got the information from a Pakistani informant rather than through the work of CIA analysts in
Sarah Maslin Nir Sarah Maslin Nir’s two-part New York Times expose of the exploitation of women who work in New York’s nail salons relied on interviews in four different languages, and is being published in four languages. In addition to English, the story is appearing in Korean, Chinese, and Spanish. Though the Times has translated stories before, it has never done so “at this scale,” says the Columbia Journalism Review. “This effort is part of a bigger New York Times initiative to translate more stories into languages of the cultures written about, Nir says, and it’s one that raises
This morning, disappointed Brits may want to turn their attention to a more hopeful kind of election: Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka is in the lead to replace Geoffrey Hill as the next Oxford professor of poetry, with more than 90 nominations so far. Oxford graduates will vote next month for what’s widely seen as the top job in academic poetry. Soyinka’s nearest rival, Ian Gregson, has 54 backers so far, and offers a cri de coeur for poets everywhere, who’ve suffered “a catastrophic loss of cultural prestige and popularity”. Gregson said in a statement: “ You could, now, be as
The New York Times is restructuring its daily meetings to prioritize digital content ahead of the print paper. Executive editor Dean Baquet told the staff that print is still pretty important, though: “Page One, and the print newspaper, remain a crucial part of what we do. . . . Our increased emphasis on digital publishing does not in any way detract from our commitment to giving our print subscribers the richest, most inviting experience every day.” Keith Gessen has written a piece for n+1 explaining why he signed a protest letter to PEN over the awarding of this year’s freedom
Cup illustrated by Julian Callos Money, money, money. Yet another rumor emerges that Michael Bloomberg is keen to buy the New York Times, this time for a smooth $5 billion, McSweeney’s asks its fans for $150,000 on Kickstarter, and Vice Media looks set to pull in $1 billion in revenue this year. Meanwhile, the venerable Onion has its own grand designs. Quoting Farhad Manjoo’s observation a couple of years ago that “now, more than ever, the Onion is in the same boat with the rest of the media” in terms of online pressures, the Atlantic notes that while that’s
Ruth Rendell Rhapsody, says the New York Times, is not just an airline magazine but a “lofty” literary journal. “An airline might seem like an odd literary patron,” the article claims. “But as publishers and writers look for new ways to reach readers in a shaky retail climate, many have formed corporate alliances with transit companies, including American Airlines, JetBlue and Amtrak, that provide a captive audience.” The popular British crime writer Ruth Rendell has died at age eighty-five. Rendell, who has been compared to Patricia Highsmith for her “fixation on criminal misfits,” wrote more than sixty novels, including
As Time magazine’s Baltimore cover recalls 1968, a reminder to the media to think twice about misusing MLK. Historian N. D. B. Connolly has a useful op-ed on the context for events in Baltimore, while Karen Attiah imagines how Western media might cover them if they were happening elsewhere in the world. Obama has announced a new reading scheme for low-income students: US publishers including Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group and Simon Schuster will provide $250m in free ebooks. A year after the firing of Jill Abramson as executive editor of the New York Times, and the debate
Shulamith Firestone posters As the crackdown continues in Baltimore, and solidarity protesters are arrested in New York, there has been |http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/30/1381348/-Washington-Post-citing-anonymous-Baltimore-PD-document-say-Freddie-Gray-severed-his-own-spine#|anger over media coverage| in major outlets like the Washington Post, which published this story, based on a “police document” it had “obtained,” suggesting that Freddie Gray had somehow caused his own injuries in custody. Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck that Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, who reported from Port-au-Prince during the 2010 earthquake, has words of warning for journalists rushing into Nepal. The dispute over PEN America’s
Bookstores in Moscow are removing copies of Art Spiegelman’s Maus from the shelves, because the graphic novel has a swastika on the cover. The author told The Guardian, “I don’t think Maus was the intended target for this, obviously. . . But I think [the law banning Nazi propaganda] had an intentional effect of squelching freedom of expression in Russia. The whole goal seems to make anybody in the expression business skittish.” President Obama criticized the media’s coverage of the unrest in Baltimore yesterday, saying that the coverage of isolated acts of violence obscures the larger issues, adding, “If
Teju Cole The Wire’s David Simon spoke up on his website about events in Baltimore, where the National Guard was called out and a curfew declared after anger surged in response to yet another death in police custody (Freddie Gray’s funeral took place yesterday). Ta-Nehisi Coates saw the situation very differently: “When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.” Six writers—Peter Carey, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Francine Prose, and
Alexis Madrigal Tonight, St. Joseph’s College is hosting a birthday tribute to the late, great novelist Gilbert Sorrentino. Organized by Doubleday editor (and Bookforum contributor) Gerald Howard and Greenlight Bookstore, the event will feature readings and discussions of his work by a stellar group of admirers, including Don DeLillo, Sam Lipsyte, Joshua Cohen, Christopher Sorrentino, Mark Chiusano, and James Wolcott. Alexis Madrigal, a former reporter at The Atlantic and the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, has been named Fusion’s new editor in chief. Hillary Frey, director of global news operations, has been
Nightmare lunch date Karl Ove Knausgaard Without direct reference to the New Republic or its attack on him, Cornel West has responded on Facebook, noting the many reasons aside from sour grapes that one might have for criticising an American president (see today’s headlines for one example), and writing that “character assassination is the refuge of those who hide and conceal these issues in order to rationalize their own allegiance to the status quo.” In his review of the latest Knausgaard installment, which will run in this Sunday’s New York Times, Jeffrey Eugenides brings some special expertise to bear,