John Oliver Bookforum is now available as an app! You may download our Summer issue for free at the iTunes store. Single issues and one-year subscriptions will be available for purchase with the launch of our next issue, out in early September. In a recent episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver had words for publishers using native advertising (i.e., ads that have the appearance of news stories), to bolster revenues. In Oliver’s view, native ads will erode public trust in the media. The comedian specifically targeted The Atlantic, for its much-maligned scientology ad in early 2013, and the New York Times for
Tired of complaints about Amazon, Chris Kubica recently spoke with people in the publishing industry about what they thought would make a Publisher’s Weekly has named the “most anticipated books of Fall 2014.” Jason Diamond, who has covered books at Flavorwire, is moving to Men’s Journal. Monica Lewinski is now a contributor to Vanity Fair, Beth Kseniak, a spokesperson for the magazine, has told Politico. “There is no set schedule or subject area, but she and her editor are on the lookout for relevant topics of interest,” says Kseniak.
Kate Bolick The New Inquiry is closing in on its $25,000 goal in a fundraising campaign that ends today. If the (excellent) online magazine reaches its goal, an anonymous donor will kick in a matching $25,000 gift. The writer Kate Bolick, who hosts a literary interview series at Edith Wharton’s country estate, the Mount, has compiled a guide to entertaining that takes cues from Wharton’s life and literature. Bolick’s first tip (“Chapter 1: Police the Guest List”) begins: “Only invite people you really like—otherwise there’s no point.” McSweeney’s is launching a short-story contest for undergraduate and graduate students. The fee to enter is
Margot Adler T.C. Boyle’s East is East includes a character called “La Dershowitz,” a young writer of high ambitions and meager talent who writes restaurant reviews. At the Paris Review blog, Michelle Huneven reveals that the character was clearly based on her: She knew Boyle, who called her “La Huneven”; she wrote restaurant reviews; she was an aspiring novelist. Huneven describes the pain of recognizing herself in the “talentless airhead poseur trying to break into the hallowed world of literature,” the ”sense of powerlessness and an utter lack of recourse.” And yet people who recognize themselves in their friends’
Christian Rudder OkCupid’s popular blog, OkTrends, is back after a three-year hiatus. Written by Christian Rudder, a co-founder of the dating website, the blog returns with a post mocking Facebook’s recent data-collection scandal—not making fun of Facebook, as you might think, but rather what Rudder considers the naive outrage of its users: “Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” OkTrends, after all, is built on data gathered from OkCupid users. Rudder describes one experiment in which they gave people a faulty
Cory Arcangel On Friday, Buzzfeed fired its editor and writer Benny Johnson for plagiarism, after learning from Twitter users that Johnson had been lifting passages from other stories, sometimes word for word, without attribution in his own work. Upon reviewing Johnson’s work, Buzzfeed found 41 cases of plagiarism in 500 of Johnson’s posts. Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has issued an apology to the site’s readers. Roxane Gay, author of the recent novel An Untamed State and the new essay collection Bad Feminist, is stepping down as the essay editor at The Rumpus. She has been replaced by Mary-Kim Arnold. Dazed and
On the Believer website, Sheila Heti interviews Patricia Lockwood as part of a new ongoing series of conversations about Twitter. “The only thing that dictates whether I respond to someone is whether I have something interesting to say in return,” Lockwood says of her Twitter habits. “I respond to people I don’t know at all, when their tweet hauls a nice fresh bucket of water up out of me, but if it comes up empty then I just stay quiet.”
The Baffler debuts a sleek new website this week, for the first time collecting its full digital archive from 1988 to the current issue, which includes: “25 issues, 432 contributors, 277 salvos, 450 graphics, 172 poems, 73 stories, 3,396 pages made of 1,342,785 words.” There’s something for every cheerful pessimist: Nicholson Baker’s “Dallas Killers Club,” say, or Eileen Myles’s story “Springs,” or the savage caricatures of Ralph Steadman.
Judith Butler Robert Stein, an editor at magazines such as McCall’s and Redbook, died last week at age 90. In its obituary, the Times points out that McCall’s (known as a “women’s magazine”) evolved rapidly under Stein’s innovative leadership: “He led in-depth coverage of the civil rights movement in its early days, interviewed President John F. Kennedy on nuclear weapons, polled seminarians in 1961 on their religious beliefs.” Stein brought a number of boldface names to his magazines: Gloria Steinam, Margaret Mead, Harper Lee, and Martin Luther King Jr. He not only hired Pauline Kael, but also fired her.
At the Believer, Sheila Heti interviews Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the LRB and a regular Bookforum contributor, about his Twitter oeuvre, including the “fake livetweeting” that is one of his specialties. Lorentzen’s Twitter persona is “deliberately unstable”: “It was natural from the start to throw my voice around, to be ‘me’ or ‘not me’ in tweets.” Reading Twitter, he says, is like “watching a stream of garbage flow in order to see what colour the trash is today.” His most recent piece for Bookforum was a review of Emily Gould’s novel, Friendship.
Marja Mills Harper Lee, the reclusive writer of To Kill a Mockingbird, issued a biting letter on Monday in response to Marja Mills’s newly published memoir, The Mockingbird Next Door, which describes Mills’s friendship with Lee and her sister Alice. Mills became friends with the pair in 2004, after she moved in next door to them. “It did not take long to discover Marja’s true mission,” Lee writes. “I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised. I immediately cut off all contact with Miss Mills, leaving town whenever she headed this way.” Simon Schuster is apparently “in talks” with
Julia Turner Slate welcomes Julia Turner as its new editor in chief. Turner is taking over from David Plotz, who held the position for six years. She won’t be making any drastic changes, she says: “David and I have worked so closely together, so harmoniously and for so long, that the magazine as it is reflects much of my thinking.” On Monday, David Mitchell posted three dozen tweets, the first installments in his Twitter short story, “The Right Sort,” narrated by a teenager on Valium. The Feminist Times failed to raise enough money from a recent crowdfunding campaign to remain in operation, it has
Nadine Gordimer in 1953 South African novelist Nadine Gordimer died yesterday evening at her home in Johannesburg. She was 90. Rachel Aviv reviewed Gordimer’s Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black for Bookforum in 2008. Germany has won the World Cup. The tournament was record-breaking for Univision, which has enjoyed very high numbers of viewers in Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and New York. Even before yesterday’s finals, the network had drawn 80 million viewers, 60 percent more than it did for the 2010 games. The New York Times considers the Amazon monopoly through one of Amazon’s writers, Vincent Zandri: “He is edited by Amazon editors and
Sarah McGrath Riverhead Books has announced that Sarah McGrath will be its new editor in chief. McGrath has been an acquiring editor at Riverhead since 2006, and has worked with Khaled Hosseini, Meg Wolitzer, and Chang-rae Lee, among others. The New York Times has hired Katie Rosman of the Wall Street Journal to be a columnist for its style section. Recently, the National Academy of Sciences journal published an article drawing on data gathered by Facebook without its users’ knowledge or consent. In the experiment, Facebook manipulated the newsfeeds of nearly 700,000 people in order to judge whether their
Virginia Woolf photographed by Giselle Freund In a letter on Tuesday, Amazon said they would give Hachette authors 100 percent of profits of e-book sales. Hachette said to accept the offer would be “suicide.” Amazon said it would be no such thing. But the online retailer, which has been trying to extract better terms on e-book sales from Hachette for months, has little to lose; giving away e-books would cost Hachette far more. The public bickering follows a letter signed by hundreds of writers demanding that Amazon “stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business.”
Alexis Madrigal Adam Bellow—son of Saul Bellow, as he must tire of being reminded—has compiled a Buzzfeed list for readers worried about “the ingrained (and often unconscious) liberalism of mainstream popular culture.” Never fear! There is “a growing countercultural revolt” that has “escaped widespread notice,” and all you need to do is turn to Bellow’s website, Liberty Island, to find examples of “the best in conservative fiction”: say, The Holy Land, a “delightfully un-PC” sci-fi novel “reflecting satirically on the Middle East conflict”; or the Will Tripp novels, about a “pissed off attorney at law” (“Spare him your pained