Allan Kornblum Last night, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to bring charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown. The demonstrations against the decision are righteous and angry and ongoing. Here’s Raven Rakia on what gets called a protest and what gets called a riot. The key difference? Who is protesting and where, not what they’re doing. “Violence is a realistic factor, and sometimes, a tactic, in all of these protests. Resisting is never peaceful. If the State fears you, it will crack down on you violently.” Color of Change, an online civil rights organization started in the wake of
Laura Poitras The passwords we use say a great deal about us and often have elaborate histories. At the New York Times, a story about these “tchotchkes of our inner lives” that commemorate what is important to us—“a motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar.” Laura Poitras has received the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for her reporting on the NSA and Edward Snowden. Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!,” received a lifetime achievement award. New York Magazine has rolled out a
Clancy Martin becoming a karate dad Daniel Handler made some flat-footed and racist jokes while hosting Wednesday’s National Book Awards event. It’s no fun to watch. He apologized yesterday on Twitter, but the bad taste lingers. As Roxane Gay put it: “It’s not one off color joke, it’s the sum of all of them, everywhere, from the people you are most inclined to like and love.” Recover from the embarrassment of watching Handler by watching Louise Glück, who accepted her award with endearing emotion. She thanked her colleagues in poetry, “who have more times than I can say astonished
The National Book Awards were announced last night in Manhattan. Phil Klay won for his short-story collection Redeployment (beating out our favorite, Marilynne Robinson), Louise Glück won for her poetry collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, and Evan Osnos won for his nonfiction book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. Ursula K. Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her speech, Le Guin was critical: The literary community should take science fiction and fantasy more seriously, and writers and editors should stop blindly trying to make books make more money.
Emil Michael On Monday, at a dinner at the Waverly Inn, an executive of Uber suggested that the company ought to hire people to smear journalists—PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy was the example—who have criticized their practices. (Lacy had recently written about the sexism in the company’s corporate culture.) Unfortunately for Uber, a Buzzfeed editor was at the dinner. In the aftermath of the story, written by Ben Smith, Uber’s CEO apologized for the company and on behalf of the executive, Emil Michael, in a series of tweets that is especially amusing, as the Awl pointed out, when accompanied by a
Leslie Jamison On Friday, a federal appeals court decided in a two-to-one vote that Michael Lewis did not a libel a money manager in the bestselling book The Big Short, about the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The suit focused on Lewis’s chapter “Spider-Man at the Venetian,” which detailed a 2007 conversation between Wing Chau and hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman. Chau and his firm, Harding Advisory LLC, sued Lewis, Eisman, and publisher W. W. Norton, saying that the book made him and other CDOs look like “crooks or morons.” At the Awl, Jacqui Shine offers an impressive essay on the New York
John Cook Amazon and Hachette have announced that they’ve reached an agreement following their months-long dispute: Hachette will now be allowed to decide its own e-book prices. Michael Pietsch, the CEO, sounded satisfied with the outcome, calling it “great news for writers.” But the New Republic argues that Hachette ought to have kept up the fight for longer: What was getting fought over was bigger than e-book pricing, and the consequences of Amazon’s strong-arming of Hachette will continue to reverberate: “If Amazon continues to interfere in publishers’ pricing decisions, publishers will be forced to produce more and more high-revenue yielding
Adrian Chen Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn has written a comic, Masks, about a mother who retaliates against her son’s bully. It will be released by Dark Horse in February. Lynne Tillman on cynicism at Frieze: “I’m not a cynic. I prefer irony, which depends on the ability to hold contradictory ideas, which probably springs from ambivalence. People confuse and conflate irony with insincerity and dishonesty; they believe an ironist isn’t serious. But saying the opposite of what is meant allows for at least two meanings to fly.” Ed Park is leaving Amazon and the Little A imprint he helped
Jonah Lehrer The Awl announces a redesign and asks for submissions. They’re looking for stuff about “architecture; urbanism (but not the dull, aggravating kind); interesting pieces or works of criticism about movies, books, television, or music that are not simply reviews or recaps or RED HOT TAKES; observed non-fiction; offbeat works about fashion and style; stories about places and cities and towns that aren’t New York (and also that are) and the people living in them that would work wonderfully in an alt-weekly; labor and capital and activism(!);videogames because why not; food and drink; history, personal or otherwise; c
The New Yorker is instating a paywall today, after months of offering everything in the magazine for free. Readers will have access to six free articles a month, after which they will need to subscribe. Anything on the website will count towards the six, in effect erasing the distinction (and implicit hierarchy) between ‘web’ pieces and ‘magazine’ pieces, and providing an incentive for the magazine to make all its content equally good.
Rozalia Jovanovic St. Martin’s Press has bought a debut novel by Stephanie Clifford, a New York Times reporter, for seven figures. The book, Everybody Rise, describes a young woman’s social and professional striving in 2006-era Manhattan. Jian Ghomeshi has lost his book deal with Penguin Random House Canada, in the wake of allegations of violent sexual assault on eight women he has been involved with. He’s also lost his job, his agent, his PR firm, and his crisis management firm. Snapchat is in talks with Buzzfeed, Comedy Central, Time, National Geographic, Spotify, Vice, and others about “Discover,” a proposed
The Virginia-based conservative website the Independent Journal Review—a cross between RedState and Buzzfeed, according to one of the site’s advisors—is becoming increasingly popular. Its traffic—about 24 million unique visitors per month— outstrips that of the Drudge Report and Breitbart News, and the founders are proud of drawing more readers with fewer stories than other similar websites. In August the IJReview received 14 million Facebook shares for 646 articles, while the Huffington Post published thirty-eight times as many articles for only four times as many shares. The founders credit “putting the right content in front of the right audience.”
Tom Magliozzi, right, with his brother Ray Jill Abramson, the former Times executive editor, revealed more details of the media company she’s working on with journalist Steven Brill. Abramson says she’ll pay $100,000 advances (yes, you read that correctly) to writers so they can work on novella-length stories that will be featured online, with one new story appearing each month. At the Paris Review Daily, authors Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree discuss their new book, Our Secret Life in the Movies, a book of short stories about the writers’ year spent watching the entire Criterion Collection together. “We were
Cathy Park Hong In a piece about the recently deceased Ben Bradlee, Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann describes the former WaPo editor’s memorial service and notes: “Part of what made the scene at the cathedral a bit harrowing in its palpable longing to continue worshiping the fallen editorial hero of the Watergate years is that today’s Washington Post is just a shadow of its former self.” At the Telegraph, Rupert Hawksley writes that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists—based on a Ted Talk she gave in 2012, “might just be the most important book you read all year.”
Matt Taibbi The Intercept gives the backstory to Matt Taibbi’s recent departure from First Look (its parent company), describing his resignation as the result of “months of contentious disputes” that Taibbi had with Pierre Omidyar, Randy Ching, and John Temple (First Look’s founder, COO, and president, respectively). Taibbi had been hired to head Racket, which was conceived of as a satirical magazine, but problems arose over the “structure and management” of the site. According to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and Jon Cook (all are listed as authors on the story), the conflict has to do with a schism
Galway Kinnell The poet Galway Kinnell died on Tuesday in Vermont. He was eighty-seven. Poetry, Kinnell said, “is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” Read some of his poems at the Poetry Foundation. Knopf has signed a two-book, six-figure deal with Stephanie Danler, a thirty-year-old writer who managed to attract attention to the manuscript of her debut novel, Sweetbitter, by mentioning it to Peter Gethers—the editor-at-large of Penguin Random House who is a regular at the West Village
Malcolm Lowry in 1946 In Ballast to the White Sea, a novel by Malcolm Lowry thought to have been lost in a fire, is being published in Canada in a scholarly edition by the University of Ottawa Press. Jan Gabriel, Malcolm’s first wife, had apparently kept an early version of the manuscript, which she gave to the New York Public Library in 2000. Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, and others will auction off the right to name certain characters in their novels. Atwood offers the chance of appearing as yourself in the book she’s currently writing