Grégoire Delacourt A very silly lawsuit brought by Scarlett Johansson against a French novelist, Grégoire Delacourt, claims that he defamed the actress in his novel La première chose qu’on regard—in English, something like The First Thing You Look At. The character in question isn’t Johansson, but a model who resembles the actress. Nevertheless, a French judge has ruled that Delacourt owes Johansson $3,4oo for portraying her—in a work of fiction—as having had two affairs she never engaged in. Unless Johansson reads French, it’s unlikely that she’s read La première chose; it hasn’t been translated. According to a Harvard Business

J. G. Ballard It’s not clear how Google will be adhering to a May decision that gives European citizens the “right to be forgotten.” The company restored links to two Guardian stories (about a soccer referee’s lies about a penalty decision) that it had previously removed, but has not done so with a BBC story about the ousting of Merrill Lynch CEO E. Stanley O’Neill. The New Inquiry has launched a “flash fundraiser”: If the magazine can raise $25,000 by August 1, an anonymous donor will match the amount. On the occasion of the British reissue of J. G.

Ira Glass Vice Media is moving to a 60,000-square-foot former warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will reportedly help it add 525 more employees to its current staff of 400. The Wall Street Journal has laid off between 20 and 40 employees in recent weeks. Gawker has launched a new vertical, “Disputations,” which makes public the internal chatter of its employees. At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Caroline O’Donovan discusses Gawker’s desire “to take the private parts” of its writers’ “intelligence and character and turn them into monetizable content.” Will readers bite? On Twitter, NPR’s David Folkenflick complained that Buzzfeed and

Carla Blumenkranz Carla Blumenkranz is moving from n+1, where she was managing editor, to a position as senior online editor at the New Yorker. Dayna Tortorici, currently a senior editor, will take her place. At the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel takes on the much-discussed French economist Piketty. Capital in the 21st Century, Kunkel writes, is “more exciting considered as a failure than as a triumph.” “Piketty has bid a lingering goodbye to the latter-day marginalism of mainstream economics but has not yet arrived at the reconstructed political economy foreseen at the outset. His theoretical reach fumbles where his statistical

NoViolet Bulawayo The New York Times on a “new wave” of African writers that includes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu,Helen Oyeyemi,NoViolet Bulawayo,Teju Cole,Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Taiye Selasi. “Some writers and critics scoff at the idea of lumping together diverse writers with ties to a diverse continent. But others say that this wave represents something new in its sheer size, after a long fallow period.” Now a decade old, the online literary magazine Guernica, which has so far relied on unpaid contributors, is hiring a new publisher, Lisa Lucas, and making plans to expand into print. Novelist and onetime

Francisco Goldman Publisher’s Weekly’s annual report on the global publishing market has the education publisher Pearson in the top spot, with over nine billion dollars in revenue, and Random House as the world’s largest trade publisher, making around three billion dollars in 2013. The Obama administration is deciding whether to continue pursuing charges that could send author James Risen to jail. In State of War, Risen used an anonymous source to describe a failed CIA operation in Iran. The Bush Administration demanded that Risen reveal his source, but the author has refused. According to the New York Times, “Whatever

John Green On KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt talks to Edmund White and his husband, Michael Carroll, about their recent books. Sarah Polley will be writing and directing an adaptation of the YA book Looking for Alaska, by John Green. The June/July issue of the Atlantic Monthly is out. In an article about the effect of autocorrect on punctuation, Joe Pinsker quotes a linguistics professor who points out that the devices that are usually blamed for corrupting conventions may, with the autocorrect function, ultimately be responsible for preserving them. Meanwhile, Sarah Boxer writes about the dead-mother trope in animated children’s

Ana María Matute The Spanish writer Ana María Matute has died. She was 88. Matute was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize. Her last novel, Family Demons, is due out in the fall. John Cheever’s Westchester house is on the market. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom house, which was built in 1795, is for sale for $525,000. The New York Times ends “The Lede” blog. Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Poynter that the paper has been “moving away from blogs in the past year.” In fact, “almost half” of the paper’s blogs will soon close or merge. Twitter is trying

Joel Johnson At the New Inquiry, an animated map tracks the shifting prominence of American cities in novels over the past two hundred years, drawing on Google Ngram data.“More than anything,” write the map’s creators, the data “shows the enduring dominance of New York City, towering over the cultural landscape in a way that the map, with its pseudo-logarithmic scale, can’t even do justice to.” The Tumblr “Last Night’s Reading” offers drawings of writers doing readings in New York, along with quotations from the writer’s remarks. (Geoff Dyer: “You can’t do it without talent, but you can’t do it

Emily Gould People taking office are swearing in using e-readers. “A Kindle is not a beautiful object,” Hannah Rosefield notes at the New Yorker. But this may be partly the point. “As cool as a copy of the Constitution from the eighteenth century would have been,” says Suzi LeVine, the American ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, “ I wanted to use a copy that is from the twenty-first century, and that reflects my passion for technology and my hope for the future.” Also at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain reviews a new biography of Stephen Crane. “Existential compromises fascinated Crane.

Rachel Rosenfelt The New York Times and Elle profile Emily Gould, whose first novel, Friendship, comes out July 1. A study examining the brain activity of experienced and novice writers showed differences in the two groups of subjects: the caudate nucleus, which figures in skills that come with practice, was active in experts; in novices it wasn’t. As Carl Zimmer explains at the Times, “the inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch” resembled those of “people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports”: “When we first start learning a skill — be it

Pablo Neruda Twenty previously unknown poems by Pablo Neruda have been found among his papers. The poems were discovered in a box of manuscripts at the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Santiago, Chile; the earliest dates from the mid-1950s. At El Pais, read an excerpt in Spanish. At the Paris Review Daily, the poet Rowen Ricardo Phillips is blogging the World Cup. First editions of Haruki Murakami’s new novel will come with a sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators, the Guardian reports, shaking its head over the increasingly frantic publicity efforts of publishers. Penguin Books published an astonishing

Hanya Yanagihara The Peter Mendelson has posted the jacket design for Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island, which will be published by Knopf in February 2015. At the Baffler, Jacob Silverman reflects on YouTube’s recent threat to block the videos of independent labels if the labels don’t agree to YouTube-set terms. The company’s “rough tactics clash with its self-generated populist aura,” Silverman observes. An interview with Barbara Cassin, the author of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, which appeared originally in French and has been reworked and rereleased in multiple languages. “The term untranslatable is itself difficult to translate,” Cassin

Charles Barsotti (and his cartoon dog) The cartoonist Charles Barsotti died yesterday, at the age of eighty. Barsotti drew nearly 1400 cartoons for the New Yorker over the course of fifty years. Gawker Media graduated the first class of its “Recruits” program, which trains new writers and pays them a $1500 monthly stipend, plus extra money based on how many clicks they can generate ($5 for every 1000 “uniques,” or unique visitors). Eight of the first eighteen recruits will be hired on full-time. “The written word has been dying for so long!!” Rivka Galchen exclaims at the New York Times.

Ben Marcus Carla Blumenkranz, a writer and editor at n+1, has just been hired to be a senior editor at the New Yorker’s website. Disappointed by the exclusion of women from most discussions of the mystical Great American Novel, Elaine Showalter chooses six women writers from the United States who should be part of the conversation. According to Nielsen, the self-publishing market is growing rapidly in the UK, where approximately 81 million self-published titles were sold last year. Ben Marcus—the author of Notable American Women and The Flame Alphabet, among other innovative works of fiction—learns to love (or at

bell hooks What obstacles are in the way of reading anything of any length today, and how has the novel responded to these competitors for readers’ attention? At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks considers the effects of the problem “we all know”—that “every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for” because “the mind . . . is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication or, if that is too grand a word, to the back and forth of contact with others.” Not only are we constantly interrupted, we want to be interrupted. Contemporary novels have

Jill Abramson At the New Republic, Christopher Ketcham has written a long article about the accusation that Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is a plagiarist. The lineup for the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival have been announced with usual borough suspects such as Paul Auster and Colson Whitehead being joined by more than 100 other writers, including Edmund White, A. M. Homes, Philippe Petit, and Rebecca Mead. The festival’s main events will be held on September 21st, with other readings, talks, and panels running from the 15th through the 22nd. Harvard University has announced that Jill Abramson will teach narrative nonfiction courses

François Truffaut On the eve of the world cup, eleven writers—including Karl Ove Knausgaard, Geoff Dyer, Joseph O’Neill—pick the most compelling characters of the tournament. O’Neill chooses Netherlands star Arjen Robben: “Aged 30, he is a ringer for Patrick Stewart, who is 73. Like Stewart, Robben is chronically histrionic, only his is a limited villainous repertoire of dives, false grimaces, and mock seizures. Even his brilliance gets under the skin.” A limited-edition book featuring the five “Talk of the Town” pieces Lillian Ross wrote about Francois Truffaut between the years 1960 and 1976 is being published. Chris Lehmann looks

Rebecca Curtis Yesterday, a federal appeals court granted universities, in conjunction with Google, the right to continue scanning millions of library books without the authors’ permission. The case, which was brought by the Authors’ Guild and other writers groups, argued that the scanning project breaks copyright law, but the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the scanning project falls within the accepted practices of the “fair use” doctrine. George Will’s latest Washington Post Op-Ed presents sexual assault at colleges as a sham perpetuated in large part by President Obama, and argues that victimhood is “a coveted status

Samuel Beckett Darren Aronofsky is adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy for HBO. The bracket, books, and judges for Three Percent’s World Cup of Literature have been announced. Representing the US is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, because the book, as the tournament’s organizers explain, is a lot like the national team: “An unfinished product, made of various pieces, and all about boredom (which is how some people in the States view soccer as a whole).” The New Yorker has launched a new blog by Joshua Rothman on art and science. Karl Ove Knausgaard arrived in New York last week