At the Intercept, Natasha Vargas-Cooper has a multipart interview with Jay Wilds, who figures prominently in Sarah Koenig’s twelve-episode documentary podcast, Serial, and who was a key witness in the case against Adnan Syed. (Syed was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend in 1999, but has maintained his innocence; Serial suggests he may be telling the truth and casts doubt on Wilds.) The Observer talks to Vargas-Cooper about her decision to do the interview.“I think [Wilds is] a really complicated guy and I think I’m dealing with somebody who has like been really traumatized. [This interview] has intensified and further armed the pro-Adnan people,

Bob Mankoff Forward names 2014 the year of Soviet-born writers, with books by Lev Golinkin (A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka), Yelena Akhtiorskaya (Panic in a Suitcase), Anya Ulinich (Lena Finkel’s Magic Barrel), David Bezmozgis (The Betrayers), Gary Shteyngart (Little Failure), Lara Vapnyar (The Scent of Pine), and Ellen Litman (Mannequin Girl). Bookforum interviewed Akhtiorskaya over the summer and reviewed her novel as well. The Guardian previews fiction and nonfiction to be published in the coming year, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, and Anne Enright’s The Green Road. The newspaper is also eager for a book

Tomaz Salamun Bill de Blasio has blamed the media for “dividing” people. Not a very original move, but the mayor’s irritation in this case is somewhat understandable. He was asked in a press briefing whether he’d let his children recite some of the chants that have been sung at protests in recent weeks, specifically those that compare the NYPD to the KKK. De Blasio pointed out that most protesters had not repeated this chant: “What you manage to do is pull up the few who do not represent the majority, who are saying unacceptable things.” He’s unhappy because some

New York Magazine has a timeline describing Rolling Stone’s handling of the University of Virginia rape story. Most recently, Rolling Stone has asked the Columbia University journalism school to independently review the editorial process behind the article. The magazine will publish the report once it’s concluded.

Steven W. Thrasher The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that it is creating a new annual award, the Nora Ephron Prize. The prize will be given to “a woman writer or director with a distinctive voice who embodies the spirit and vision of the legendary filmmaker and writer.” Ephron, who wrote the screenplay and directed Sleepless in Seattle, among other films, as well as many books, died in June. At Slate, David Auerbach explains why the Sony hacks are “a wake-up call.” The attack might not have been as sophisticated as StuxNet, the virus that infiltrated and sabotaged Iran’s nuclear facilities, but

Secret Behavior The last episode of the popular podcast Serial has been released. The final show does not, as most listeners hoped, provide any firm answers about the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999. Dwight Garner calls it a “tangled and heartfelt yet frustrating hour of radio.” A public defender, writing in the Washington Post, says that the show missed an opportunity to show something important about the criminal justice system. “I don’t know whether Syed is innocent,” Sarah Lustbader says, “but he was clearly convicted despite many reasonable doubts.”

Marlon James In honor of the end of the Colbert Report, the New Republic collects clips of some of Stephen Colbert’s best author interviews—with Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Richard Ford, among others. On the New York Review of Books blog, Michael Greenberg reflects on the protests in the wake of the grand-jury decision over the Eric Garner case: “Nationally, a shift of consciousness seems to have taken place, a budging of fixed ideas about African-Americans and law enforcement. Policing has become a civil rights issue.” And, on the Harper’s blog, Sam Frank reports on Manhattan’s three-day TechCrunch Disrupt conference: “Everyone

Kathryn Schulz At n+1, Nicholas Dames writes about a handful of books based in the 1970s, among them Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Norman Rush’s Subtle Bodies, and Darcey Steinke’s Sister Golden Hair. “Here is the territory the novels evoke: a mythic late summer, spacious, unsupervised, a little druggy, a little restless, hedged only by the feeling that everything is about to end,” Dames explains. The nostalgia is intense. But “what if one could imagine a nostalgia that didn’t idealize, that in fact celebrated a past moment’s stubborn resistance to idealization, that coexisted with anhedonia? The

Laura Kipnis Vice Media may explore an initial public offering next year after a “deal spree.” Two funds recently invested $250 million each in the company. “This is the birth of the next big media brand,” said CEO Shane Smith. James Patterson just gave away the third and final round of donations to independent bookstores across the country. He spent more than a million dollars this year helping out 187 bookstores with children’s book sections. The figure is pocket change for Patterson, who made ninety million last year, according to a Vanity Fair profile. The “relentless writing machine” has

Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery Late last week, the website Our Bad Media published “A Guide for Journalists: Understanding why Malcolm Gladwell Is a Plagiarist.” Included are a number of comparisons between Gladwell’s articles and articles by other writers that he most likely drew from but did not cite. Contacted by the Poynter media journalist Andrew Beaujon, New Yorker editor David Remnick responded to the blog post: “The issue is not really about Malcolm. And, to be clear, it isn’t about plagiarism. The issue is an ongoing editorial challenge known to writers and editors everywhere — to what extent

Tom McCarthy Nominate your favorite novel of the year to be a contender in the Morning News’ 2015 Tournament of Books. “Gamergate,” a loose confederation of (generally antifeminist) gamers upset about how gaming is portrayed, apparently cost Gawker seven figures, according to the company’s head of advertising. In response to a tweeted joke by writer Sam Biddle, gamergaters urged advertisers to pull ads. Gawker’s response to Biddle’s tweet and the gamergate reaction was “inconsistent and confused,” writes Peter Sterne at Capital New York. Tom McCarthy on realism at the London Review of Books: “That such blatant and splendid take-downs

Claudia Rankine Melville House is rushing publication of the newly released Torture Report. The 480-page book will be available December 30. Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of The Guardian, is leaving the newspaper. He’s been in the role for twenty years. Nick Denton has fired himself as president of Gawker. The Believer website has an interview with Claudia Rankine, whose recent book, Citizen, was nominated for the National Book Award. “If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake,” Rankine says. “You should admit, ‘What I said was racist and that is really unacceptable.’ You don’t say, ‘Get a sense

Guy Vidra The New York Times has a rare interview with the reclusive Italian writer Elena Ferrante. “My women are strong, educated, self-aware and aware of their rights,” Ferrante says, “but at the same time subject to unexpected breakdowns, to subservience of every kind, to mean feelings. I’ve also experienced this oscillation. I know it well, and that also affects the way I write.” Future editions of Lena Dunham’s recent book, Not That Kind of Girl, will come with a note saying that “Barry” is not the real name of a character Dunham says raped her at Oberlin. A former

Jenny Diski According to The Onion the Pew Research Center, “Americans feel better informed thanks to the Internet.” The Pulitzer Prize committee has expanded eligibility in two categories, investigative reporting and feature writing, to online and print magazines. They will also allow organizations to nominate journalists “employed by partnering organizations” even if the organizations are ineligible themselves. Vice held a suitably bacchanalian party for its twentieth anniversary. The Guardian profiles Jenny Diski, who has been writing riveting diaries about her inoperable lung cancer for the London Review of Books. Start with her first installment, “A Diagnosis,” move on to the second, and

Hanna Rosin Conflicting reactions to the mass editorial exodus at the New Republic continue to emerge. At Slate, Seth Stevenson describes the backlash against TNR owner Chris Hughes, as well as the backlash against the backlash. At Vox, Ezra Klein suggests that the TNR, though long important, needs some kind of change: Under the leadership of new editor Gabriel Snyder, the revamped TNR, he points out, “won’t be what The New Republic was. And that’s because the thing The New Republic was has already died.” Max Fisher considers TNR’s “race problem,” and points out that “to my knowledge, not

Leon Wieseltier Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier are both leaving the New Republic, Foer to be replaced by Gabriel Snyder. (You can read the memos in question here.) Many have greeted the news as the end of an era; some gleefully (“Let the old guard die off,” more or less) and others with dismay. This morning, a rash of further resignations came: nine senior editors, the executive editor, the legal affairs editor, the digital media editor, the poetry editor, the dance editor, and fifteen contributing editors. The only senior editors not to have resigned are Evgeny Morozov, Rebecca Traister, and Brian Beutler. On Twitter,

In New York, a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer who put Eric Garner in the chokehold that killed him. It would be astonishing and enraging under any circumstances, but it’s even more so coming so closely on the heels of the Saint Louis grand jury that failed to bring charges against Darren Wilson. Thousands of protesters gathered in Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and Union Square after the announcement, and succeeded in blocking traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel, Brooklyn Bridge, and R.F.K. Bridge. Eighty-three people were arrested. This evening there will be a demonstration at Foley Square at 5:30

At Page-Turner, Adelle Waldman reconsiders the traditional novel. It’s “fashionable” to think of it as over, or to suppose that memoir and autobiographical novels are the only way forward. But the form offers possibilities that nonfiction and autobiography do not. Among them, it allows the writer subjects that aren’t herself: “Channeling people other than the author also makes possible the presentation of multiple consciousnesses, enabling novels to capture some of the populous cacophony of real life.”

The Times has announced its notable books list for 2014. Our new issue is out and, we submit, it’s kind of special. To celebrate our twentieth anniversary, we invited current and former contributors—including Geoff Dyer, Christian Lorentzen, Christine Smallwood, Lydia Davis, Luc Sante, J. Hoberman, Chris Kraus, and many others—to write about notable books of the past twenty years. Meanwhile, Heather Havrilesky points out the best-seller list’s spectacular mansplaining, Melanie Rehak reflects on the Brooklynification of all food, and Christopher Lyon picks out the best art books. You can get all of that if you buy the print magazine in a bookstore or, better yet, subscribe. Also

Jacqueline Woodson At Al Jazeera America, Bookforum’s Chris Lehmann calls out progressives for failing to respond to the grand jury decision in Ferguson last week. “It speaks volumes about the anorexic state of liberal moral reasoning in today’s America that it has met the failure of a grand jury to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the Aug. 9 killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown with little more than a procedural shrug. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the system has worked, liberals intone.” At the new site the Toast, Roxane Gay writes about the Ferguson grand