More from Jenny Diski, whose serialized memoir we can’t get enough of. In this installment, someone asks, about Diski’s complicated adolescence, “Why didn’t you just do what you were told?” Diski doesn’t know how to answer. “Doing what I was told simply didn’t have a place in my story of myself. It was perfectly clear that no one had any idea what to do, so they couldn’t very well tell me. And that to do as I was told would have been to listen to people who were completely out of their depth, without a clue what to do except
Kim Gordon Tonight at the Lincoln Center Film Society, Tom McCarthy will celebrate the launch of his new novel, Satin Island, by introducing a double feature: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 essay film on the history of airplane hijackings, and Antony Balch and William S. Burroughs’s seminal 1963 collage/film Towers Open Fire. The finished version of Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, which went on sale yesterday, has deleted a comment about the musician Lana del Ray that appeared in the pre-publication galleys: “If she really truly believes it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot
Pablo Neruda reading in the Soviet Union in 1950 A judge in Chile has ruled that Pablo Neruda be reburied next to his wife, Matilde Urrutia, following an investigation into the causes of his death in 1973. For almost two years Neruda’s remains have been being studied in various laboratories to determine whether his death had been caused by poisoning. The Associated Press is moving into podcasts: They’ve recently made a deal with the podcasting network PodcastOne that will allow its audio clips to be used by the company’s two hundred podcasts. New York Magazine has a timeline—with choice
Eula Biss Today, Kate Bennett starts her new job at Politico as a DC gossip columnist. Last week in Mother Jones, David Corn and Daniel Schulman asserted that Bill O’Reilly—who has devoted time on his show to attack Brian Williams for his deceptions—may have misrepresented his own experiences during the Falklands war in 1982. “For years, O’Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don’t withstand scrutiny—even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in.” O’Reilly has tried to discredit the story on his show, and on his blog
The New York Times is trying to shift the emphasis internally from the front page of the print newspaper to the paper’s digital platforms. The paper will continue its traditional morning meetings, but rather than focusing on which stories will make the front page of the next day’s print edition, editors and writers will “compete for the best digital, rather than print, real estate.”
Noah Warren The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the stats of the New Republic exodus: Where did the people who left go? What are the demographics of those replaced them? There are now five people of color and ten women on staff (out of twenty-one people altogether). Among the thirty-five former staffers, there were zero people of color and thirteen women. CJR also tallies how many of the current staff have ivy league degrees: Nine do, twelve do not. The balance has switched; formerly, nineteen did and sixteen did not. The publishing company Open Road has just launched Factory
Atticus Lish Faber has announced that it is ending its partnership with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Mitzi Angel, Faber’s publisher since 2008, will remain with FSG, as will many Faber titles, such as Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and David Bellos’s A Fish in Your Ear. Atticus Lish—whose debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, was released last year by Tyrant books—has won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize. The New York Times is in search of a finance editor for its T Brand Studio. According to the job listing, “T Brand Studio is a fast-growing team of energetic writers, content strategists,
Ta-Nehisi Coates Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763) is selling out in Paris. Almost half as many copies have been sold over the last three weeks as have sold over the last twelve years. “People read without sharing, but just as often, perhaps, they share without reading.” At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson uses Twitter analytics to investigate how likely it is that tweets bring traffic to websites, and discovers that click-through rates—not to mention rates of people who actually read stories—are very, very low. Overall, in fact, it seems that Twitter is sending less than
Jonathan Franzen Former US poet laureate Philip Levine, the winner of a Pulitzer prize and two National Book Awards, died on Saturday at age 87. Levine, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in Detroit, and many of his poems were inspired by the city’s auto factories and working-class families. On Friday, Dan Lyons announced that he will be leaving his post as the editor of Gawker media’s Valley Wag, though he claims he may still contribute to the site. Lyon cites his new book deal as one reason that he’s leaving the position: He just sold Disrupted, “a memoir
Tonight at 6 p.m. Bookforum hosts its annual Valentine’s Day reading at the New Museum. Clancy Martin, Laura Kipnis, Lynne Tillman, Paul Beatty, and Joseph O’Neill will read selections on the theme of “Foreign Affairs.” Should be sexy! The event is free, but please RSVP to [email protected] to get on the list. Lester Holt has temporarily replaced Brian Williams, as NBC discusses whether to allow Williams to return; Holt may continue on in Williams’s place. In the New York Review of Books, Francine Prose suggests that the controversy surrounding the historical inaccuracy of films such as Selma or The Imitation Game stems from
Jon Stewart announced Tuesday night that he’ll be leaving the Daily Show. For our editor Chris Lehmann, writing at Al Jazeera, Stewart was at his best skewering the Bush administration; since then the show has felt “increasingly rudderless.” (Lehmann may not be sad to see Stewart go, but book publicists are devastated. Stewart sells a lot of books.) Meanwhile, NBC suspended Brian Williams without pay. Should the Williams and Stewart switch jobs?
Rupert Murdoch and his new puppy (Photo: Murdoch Here/Tumblr) Five years ago, Peter Thiel gave twenty-four young people (twenty-two men and two women—never mind Title IX) a hundred thousand dollars each to leave college. The Chronicle of Higher Education checks in with nine of them |http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rich-Mans-Dropout-Club/151703/#|to see what the former students did with the funding|. More than a few went back to college, but with an altered perspective on its value. One of the women returned to Princeton and left again just one credit shy of her degree. “The
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor The New York Times looks into allegations that Harper Lee was pressured into publishing Go Set A Watchman, the “parent” novel, written in the mid-1950s, of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, has persistently denied the rumors. Her story is corroborated by some, including a friend of Lee’s who visited her last summer. “Tonja has the full confidence of Nelle,” the friend told the Times. “And I can say with confidence that Tonja would not do anything that Nelle would not want her to do.” Isn’t it fishy, though, that all communications of Lee’s
Sarah Koenig Joe Klein has asked us to accept Brian Williams’s apology, saying that pundits demanding his dismissal are “self-righteous and gagging.” Klein comes at the topic from a unique perspective, having been criticized for his early denials that he was the anonymous author behind the bestselling campaign roman-a-clef Primary Colors. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has agreed to reopen the appeal of Adnan Syed, whose murder conviction was the subject of the hit podcast Serial. Last week, Sarah Koenig discussed podcasts at a New School roundtable moderated by the New York Times’s David Carr. (Carr leads off
The Times has a story on the death of Google Glass, the wearable-computing flop that at least gave us this amusing New Yorker feature by Gary Shteyngart, in which Shteyngart deploys the Glass’s full capabilities: causing motion sickness, taking many photos and videos, and translating the word hamburger into Korean.
People have been raising questions about the conditions under which Harper Lee agreed to have her second book published. Did she really agree? (She’s historically said she opposed publishing a second book.) Is she being exploited by her lawyer and others who want to profit from what will undoubtedly be the novel’s wildly successful sales figures? Mallory Ortberg thinks this might be the case. At New York, Boris Kachka reviews Lee’s history, particularly her decline in recent years, and quotes a letter that her sister Alice Lee wrote to a biographer about the Lees’ lawyer, Tonja: “I learned that without my knowledge
Harper Lee, circa 1962 A novel Harper Lee wrote in the mid-1950s, before To Kill a Mockingbird, is going to be published this summer in a run of no fewer than two million copies. Go Set a Watchman, as the book is called, follows Mockingbird’s Scout as an adult. It was out of flashback scenes to Scout’s childhood that Mockingbird was born, on the advice of Lee’s editor. The Financial Times will soon begin paying interns minimum wage for the first time in its history, the result of a deal brokered with Britain’s National Union of Journalists. The union
Nathaniel Mackey The Huffington Post aims to take better advantage of Facebook by increasing the quantity of “feel-good” stories it publishes. In a recent memo to the staff, Arianna Huffington describes “What’s Working,” a new editorial initiative that, in her words, will “double down” on “positive stories and solutions to major challenges the media too often overlook.” HuffPo will still cover the bad stuff, but—as she also announced “last week in Davos”—it wants to start a “positive contagion by relentlessly telling the stories of people and communities doing amazing things, overcoming great odds, and facing real challenges with perseverance, creativity, and grace.”
Mohamedou Ould Slahi Christian Lorentzen reviews Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary, “a relentless catalogue of grotesque abuses.” Mark Danner covers the heavily redacted book for the New York Times. The Intercept provides some information about how the book got published. Frances McDormand, who recently starred in the adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, has joined the cast of the adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Wife. The Los Angeles Review of Books has inaugurated a new series titled No Crisis, “a look at the state of critical thinking and writing—literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies—in the 21st century.”