CBC host Jian Ghomeshi has been asked to take a leave of absence from work due to allegations of engaging in nonconsensual violent sexual behavior with three women. Jesse Brown broke the story, with the help of the Toronto Star. For Americans who don’t know who Ghomeshi is (first important fact: He’s Canadian), Gawker has a primer. CBC is like NPR but “more influential,” says Gawker, and Ghomeshi is like Ira Glass but “less serious.” Ghomeshi followed up news of the allegations with a Facebook post in which he said he had been the target of “harassment, vengeance and demonization.” As of Tuesday morning,

Greg Marra At the Times, Ravi Somaiya reports on Facebook engineer Greg Marra, who helps determine what Facebook users see in the site’s news feed, and who is “fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business.” The homepages of news sites are becoming less and less of a reader destination; social-media sites, meanwhile, are sending people to actual stories. “The shift raises questions about the ability of computers to curate news, a role traditionally played by editors,” Somaiya writes. “It also has broader implications for the way people consume information, and thus how they see

Ross Douthat Amazon’s bad third-quarter earnings report prompted the price of its shares to fall by 10 percent. The conservative writer Ross Douthat apologized for attending a fundraiser in support of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit opposed to gay rights. Douthat said that he was “not aware” that the event was a fundraiser for the group; rather, he said, he thought it was to be a “public conversation about religious liberty.” He will decline the honorarium. The Guardian adds a number of opinion writers to its ranks, including Roxanne Gay, Reza Aslan, Rebecca Solnit, and Jeb Lund. Jon Weiner

Ben Bradlee Ben Bradlee, long-time editor of the Washington Post,died on Tuesday. He was ninety-three. Bradlee was in charge of the Post for twenty-six years, during which time the paper broke Watergate and won seventeen Pulitzers. Vogue has an exclusive preview of Griffin Dunne’s new documentary about Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. A Kickstarter supporting the film has already raised more than half of its $80,000 goal. A $35 donation will be reciprocated with a handwritten list of Didion’s twelve favorite books. A $50 donation comes with a PDF of her handwritten recipe book, and $2500 gets you a

Joan Didion and Vanessa Redgrave Music Literature No. 5 is out, with portfolios of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, the Norwegian writer Stig Sæterbakken, and the Chinese writer Can Xue. Each issue of the journal, which appears in print, celebrates three under-recognized artists, featuring work by and about them. Saariaho will present a concert on November 20 at the Scandinavia House to mark the issue launch. Past issues have profiled Clarice Lispector, László Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr, Arvo Pärt, Mary Ruefle, and Vladimír Godár, among others. Read an interview with the journal’s editors, Taylor Davis Van-Atta and Daniel Medin, here.

At Poynter, Andrew Beaujon has posted an opinion piece about three journalism schools that have rescinded invitations to journalists due to fears of Ebola. After quoting the statements explaining the cancellations, Beaujon writes: “‘Caution,’ ‘questions,’ ‘sensitive’—these are all apparently synonyms for willful disregard for facts, which is a curious fit for journalism schools, institutions that purportedly train people how to report what they know.”After Margo Howard’s new book Eat, Drink, and Remarry received bad reviews from Amazon’s Vine Community, an “elite” group of reviewers who weigh in on books before their publication, the author accused the online critics of sabotage. The reviews were “all

Alan Moore Mark Sarvas’s Elegant Variation, started in 2003, was one of the original and most popular book blogs. After his novel Harry, Revised was published in 2008, Sarvas stepped away from the blog, but according to a new post, TEV is back, in a slightly different format. “I’ve been attracted to and inspired by the intimacy and samizdat feel of the newsletter form, and thought I’d try a little experiment,” Sarvas writes. “I’m leaving the form open to revision (and feedback—please), but I envision an email digest (perhaps weekly, perhaps bi-weekly) for my friends, former students and perhaps interested

The University of South Carolina has acquired Elmore Leonard’s papers, one hundred and fifty boxes of them, plus a stash of his Hawaiian shirts.

This year’s Alice Award—an annual $25,000 prize for illustrated art books—goes to the Whitney Museum of American Art for Hopper Drawing, which was published in conjunction with last year’s Edward Hopper exhibit.

Richard Flanagan The Australian writer Richard Flanagan collected the Man Booker Prize yesterday for his book The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The forty-eight-year-old San Francisco Bay Guardian has abruptly stopped publication; its owner, the San Francisco Media Company, is pulling funding. Today’s issue will be the last. At Buzzfeed, Dao Nguyen has been named publisher, which means, CEO Jonah Peretti says, overseeing “tech, product, data and everything related to our publishing platform.” Nguyen has been in charge of “growth” at the website for some time, and has done very well: Buzzfeed claims to be attracting 150 million users

Cornel West Cornel West was among those arrested yesterday at a protest outside the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. The Washington Post has announced that Carlos Lozada, currently an editor at the paper’s Outlook section, will become its new nonfiction-book critic. “This summer, Carlos developed a detailed proposal on how to reimagine the role of the nonfiction book critic for a digital age—and proceeded to pitch himself for the role,” the Post says in an announcement of the hire. “He had a great idea, and we agreed that he’d be perfect for it.” The Man Booker Prize was opened

Juergen Boos According to Publisher’s Weekly, professional attendance was down at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but general enthusiasm was up, and “business was brisk.” HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, who spoke at the fair’s opening ceremony, proclaimed it a time for digital experimentation. Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos suggested that the fair itself is planning many changes, announcing that in 2015, English-language publishers will move to a more central location. “We know that digital is going to stay, print is going to stay, Amazon is going to stay,” Boos said. “But it is not the end of the world. I

Paul Budnitz The New York Observer profiles the social-media network Ello, known as Facebook’s new competitor. Ello insists that it is not trying to take over Facebook, but rather offer “a small alternative.” “Success to us just means that Ello works and that people use it,” says Paul Budnitz, a co-founder of the website. “There’s no way we’re not going to survive.” Right now, people are joining at a rate of 40,000 per hour.  A member of the Nobel Prize committee, Horace Engdahl, has suggested that writers’ increasing “professionalization” has been detrimental to their art. “Previously, writers would work as taxi

Patrick Modiano The French writer Patrick Modiano has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Modiano was born in 1945, to a Belgian actress mother and an Italian-Jewish father. His first novel, La Place de L’Etoile, about a Jewish collaborator in World War II, was published in 1968. (His father reportedly so disapproved that he tried to buy up all the copies.) Modiano has published more than twenty-five books since, among them Missing Person, Out of the Dark, and Dora Bruder. “I prefer not to read my early books,” he said in 2010. “Not that I don’t like them, but I don’t recognize myself anymore, like

Emma Cline Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, provoked a bidding war among twelve publishers and sold to Random House, as part of a three-book deal, for somewhere in the ballpark of seven figures. Now that the New York Times Magazine’s “One-Page Magazine” has been disposed of, editors Samantha Henig and Jon Kelly offer an oral history of the page’s “Meh List.” A Swedish Nobel prize judge thinks that the “professionalization” of writers—via grants and creative writing courses—is putting the future of Western literature in jeopardy. Sinead O’Connor is writing a memoir, and promises it will be juicy: “I look forward to dishing

Amanda Hess The new issue of Dissent is out, with pieces on politics and the novel from Helen DeWitt, Nikil Saval, Roxanne Gay, and Vivian Gornick. In his introduction to the issue, David Marcus writes that political novels “can help keep our eyes on the present,” offering “neither visions of what our lives ought to be like in the future nor paeans to how our lives once were lived.” The BTK serial killer explained in a letter from prison that he will cooperate with the writer Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychology professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, on her book about

Dodai Stewart EMILY’s List—an organization that advocates for female Democratic politicians who support abortion rights—has partnered with Lena Dunham, who will promote the group during her author tour for Not that Kind of Girl. At Politico, Hadas Gold suggests that the Daily Beast is thriving thanks to Tina Brown’s departure, citing a 60 percent increase in traffic over the past year. Dodai Stewart is leaving her position as managing editor of Gawker’s Jezebel site to join Fusion.net, where she’ll join Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, who left the Wall Street Journal to join the Fusion staff in July. Late last week, the

At Buzzfeed, Emily Gould says that the usual advice of Nell Zink issues a dispatch from August’s Worldcon—the World Science Fiction Convention, held this year in London—where she attended, among other events, a panel on “Being a Fan of Problematic Things.” Zink’s debut novel, The Wallcreeper, came out this week. The Economist and the Financial Times have recently begun selling ads at prices based not on number of page-views but on the how much time readers spend on a page. FT’s commercial director of digital advertising explains: “Logic would say: Let’s start to value the amount of time spent

Marilynne Robinson The American Scholar has started a list of bad opening lines of novels—Richard Powers’s opening of Galatea 2.2, to take one example: “It was like so, but wasn’t.” Two new funders of Reddit, according to a list the website recently released: Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg. People are betting on who will win the Nobel Prize for literature, which should be announced next week. Ladbrokes has predicted the winner four times in nine years (not super confidence-inducing); this year, they have five-to-one odds on Haruki Murakami and twelve-to-one odds on Joyce Carol Oates. Don Delillo and Richard Ford

Valeria Luiselli The National Book Foundation has announced the winners of its annual 5 Under 35 program. This year’s honorees are Yelena Akhtiorskaya, nominated for her debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase; Alex Gilvarry, the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, also his first novel; Phil Klay, for his book of short stories, Redeployment; Valeria Luiselli for her novel, Faces in the Crowd, translated from its original Spanish; and Kirstin Valdez Quade, for her debut short-story collection Night at the Fiestas. The winners will be celebrated at a party on November 17 at powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn. At