John Updike Yesterday, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that Frederick J. Ryan Jr.—a onetime Reagan-administration staffer and currently Politico’s first chief executive—will be replacing Katharine Weymouth as publisher of the paper. This is the first time that the Post will not be headed by a member of the Graham family since 1933, when Weymouth’s great-grandfather Eugene Meyer bought the paper. At The Atlantic, a story about Paul Moran, who systematically dug through and took items from John Updike’s trash for three years, beginning in 2006. Moran has blogged about his finds at The Other John Updike Archive, and
Tillie Olsen in the 1940s. Our fall issue is out now, with Christian Lorentzen on Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Christopher Caldwell on Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, Emily Gould on perfume nerds, and more. Amazon angers Japanese publishers. Clive Thompson on the benefits of taming “the tyranny of 24/7” email. At the New Yorker, an |about:blank|essay| about Tillie Olsen focuses on her 1934 pieceThe Strike (written when she was named Tillie Lerner), which aligns her struggles as an author with the battles that Great Depression workers fought. Olsen was influenced by the work of modernists like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, and
Cover of an Arabic edition of Georges Simenon’s “The Corpse.” New York magazine rounds up the books to look forward to this fall, including Ben Lerner’s much-anticipated novel, 10:04, which publishes next week, Lena Dunham’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, as well as new fiction from Martin Amis, Marilynne Robinson, and Denis Johnson. Rene Steinke runs down six great books about Texas that go beyond “cattle and cowboys.” Jonathan Guyer on pulp fiction and graphic novels in Egypt: “When President Hosni Mubarak breezed off . . . the police dusted, too, leaving behind a Wild West.” Now, in
David Mitchell Following the sale of the Canada-based scientific publication Experimental Clinical Cardiology to New York buyers who turned around and sold it to a group in Switzerland that nobody can seem to identify, the journal is “now publishing anything submitted along with a fee of $1,200, packaging spurious studies as serious scientific papers.” At the New Yorker, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard responds to her sexist detractors. On Twitter trolls and online commenters: “The more I’ve looked at the details of the threats and the insults that women are on the receiving end of, the more some of them
Zaha Hadid The architect Zaha Hadid is suing the New York Review of Books for libel in response to an article by the critic Martin Filler. The article quotes her incorrectly, in such a way that implies that Hadid ignored the deaths of construction workers on a building in Qatar she designed. The building in question was not yet under construction; NYRB “regrets the error.” Robert Hass has won the Wallace Stevens award, which comes with a $100,000 cash prize. The National Book Foundation will collaborate with NPR’s Morning Edition to reveal the 2014 National Book Awards finalists on October 15th.
Michael Brown Michael Brown has been buried in St. Louis. In Monday’s funeral service, attended by Al Sharpton and Spike Lee, Brown’s family members memorialized the teenager. The eighteen-year-old unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, on August 9, sparking outrage and protests across the nation. Yesterday, the New York Times public editor apologized for reporter John Eligon’s having called Brown “no angel” in a recent story: “That choice of words was a regrettable mistake. In saying that the 18-year-old Michael Brown was ‘no angel’…The Times seems
Elif Batuman At the New Yorker, Elif Batuman explains what’s wrong with comparing Ferguson and Iraq. Why did Buzzfeed’s Jeremy Singer-Vine use Github to post the data he used in an article about Jefferson and St Louis-area segregation? “As journalists marshall more data than ever, collect it from a wider range of sources, and analyze it in increasingly complex ways, it’s important (and interesting!) to be transparent about those processes.” At Salon, Molly Fischer boldly urges the New York Times Book Review to kill its Bookends column. “It’s not just the stiff phrasing (‘What should we make of this?’ ‘What’s
Matthew Rosenberg Afghanistan expelled New York Times journalist Matthew Rosenberg, and then issued a statement calling Rosenberg’s recent article about an electoral crisis in the country “more of an espionage act than a journalistic work, one that was meant to create panic and disruption in people’s minds, and provide the basis for other spying purposes.” As the Times reports, the Afghan government was apparently “infuriated” by Rosenberg’s reporting on the possibility of “forming an interim governing committee” as a way of handling the crisis—“a step that would amount to a coup.” At the New Inquiry, a defense of looting: “The
Ken Chen The second part of a series by NPR’s Lynn Neary, on diversity in the writing world, has aired. Publishing is “overwhelmingly white,” the writer Daniel José Older says. “That’s not a controversial fact, but sometimes to point it out becomes a controversial thing.” Publishing companies often say that they would publish books by more diverse writers if there were a market for them. It’s not that there isn’t a market, says poet Ken Chen, it’s that publishers can’t “imagine” it: “That’s not just about a company corporate diversity policy; it’s about actually knowing what’s going on in communities
Justin Torres Journalists in Ferguson are “learning as they go,” writes Paul Farhi for the Washington Post: “It’s not just the rioters you have to worry about, say reporters; the authorities can be difficult—and dangerous—too.” You don’t say! Something Farhi might consider learning himself is not to use the term “rioters” to describe impassioned protesters facing a hostile police force. As one of Farhi’s own sources, Wesley Lowery, points out, during “ninety percent” of the time he has spent in Ferguson, the threat has been not from protesters but from the police. Facebook has been fairly useless for following Ferguson news,
Ann Leckie The 2014 Hugo Awards, which honor science fiction, have been announced. The award for best novel goes to Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (Orbit US / Orbit UK). This year Hugo nominees were more likely to be women and people of color than has historically been true, the Daily Dot reports. The Telegraph profiles Jennifer Weiner, who complains that she was “devastated” when she heard that Jennifer Egan had advised women not to write chick lit. About Lena Dunham, who has said that she loathed “airport chick lit,” Weiner says, “I’m sure she has just no clue
Rembert Browne Al Gore has sued Al Jazeera, claiming that the news provider, owned by the Qatari Royal family, has failed to pay the full amount agreed upon in the purchase of Gore’s network, Current TV. Medium, the website of “stories and ideas” and serious journalism founded by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, has announced that it will make public its followers and what articles they read at the site. “Medium is in a grey area between platform and publishing,” Selena Larson writes, and goes on to argue that revealing what people read is an infringement on readers’ sense of
Mary Beard The Associated Press reports that on Wednesday, an AP video journalist, Simone Camilli, and a Palestinian translator, Ali Shehda Abu Afash, were killed in Gaza. In its cover story this month, Wired calls Edward Snowden the most wanted man in the world. The LARB talks to the classicist and wonderful critic Mary Beard, whose most recent book, Laughter in Ancient Rome, came out in July. Beard has been unruffled by (classy about?) the negative attention she’s received in Britain for something entirely unrelated to her formidable career: appearing on television with undyed hair. “It’s not like I’m
The much-maligned app Yo—which allows users to say “Yo” to one another—should not be dismissed as a novelty, the Wall Street Journal says. When the app’s monosyllabic greeting pops up in your smartphone’s notifications tray (and a tiny voice repeats the word) the app is exploiting push notifications, “the most valuable property in the entire media universe, considering how often the average smartphone owner glances at his or her phone.” Future iterations of Yo will allow users to send links along with the greeting and to connect the app to RSS feeds. Soon, “every blogger, website and media outlet on earth”
Maureen Dowd Maureen Dowd has been named a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. She will continue to write her op-ed column for the Sunday edition of the paper. In June, Publisher’s Weekly reported that Hachette had acquired Perseus Books. But now, according to a letter sent out to Perseus employees, the deal has been canceled. At the Times, David Carr devotes his column to the recent decisions by Gannett, the Tribune Company, and E.W. Scripps to spin off their newspaper properties. The optimism people felt for print media when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post is
Jim Frederick The New York Times reports that journalist Jim Frederick—the author of Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death—has died. The Times obituary describes Black Hearts as documenting “the intense and withering experience of a group of men who were poorly commanded, overwhelmed with stress and witness to myriad bloody calamities, including the deaths of comrades.” Politico reports that Amazon has hired a group of lobbyists and wooed members of Congress in an attempt to build its political influence: “Amazon’s aggressive tactics were on display in July, when the Federal Trade Commission prepared to sue it
Yelena Akhtiorskaya “The permanent retainer behind Liza’s uninsured upper front teeth had endured some irremediable catastrophe, leaving her bowl of cereal unchomped for the first time in decades.” So begins “Sentimental Driftwood,” a story by Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose first book, Panic in a Suitcase, has just been released by Riverhead. The story begins: Carla Blumenkranz recently interviewed Akhtiorskaya for Bookforum. At the LRB, the novelist Helen DeWitt describes being stalked at her family cottage in Vermont. When her stalker is finally, after many months, arrested, the sentence he receives is minimal. He has been punished for a single incident, a break-in,
The New Inquiry’s August issue, on the unseasonable theme of “Mourning,” is out. From the editors’ note: “A good death is the deal life made with us, or vice versa: a world of intensities and sensations, for the price of its end. But the ubiquity of colonial and capitalist murder breaks the pact between life and death by rendering both bleakly arbitrary.”
Jeffery Renard Allen Tonight at 7pm, we’ll be at BookCourt to see a stellar group of authors—all faculty of Farleigh Dickinson’s MFA program—read their work: Jeffrey Renard Allen (Song of the Shank), Rene Steinke (Friendswood), David Grand (Mount Terminus), Thomas E. Kennedy (Beneath the Neon Egg), and H.L. Hix (As Much as, If Not More Than). n+1 on paying writers: “For a young writer who hopes to produce literature, the greatest difference between now and twenty years ago may be that now she expects to get paid. Twenty years ago, art and commerce appeared to be opposing forces. The more