Robert Silvers At the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner uses Michiko Kakutani’s write-up of Hillary Clinton’s new memoir as a “good lesson in how not to write a review.” Robert Silvers recalls how The New York Review of Books became the subject of Martin Scorsese’s latest documentary. “The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it.” At Salon, Thomas Frank charts the alarming surge in college tuition, which is leaving generations in debt, and

Simon Critchley Joshua Rothman introduces a new “blog about ideas” at the New Yorker. Never mind books, it’s time for the World Cup! Some vaguely literary world cup coverage ahead of the tournament next week: John Cassidy at the New Yorker, and Simon Critchley at Roads Kingdoms. Capital New York reports that the law firm Outten Golden, which has sued Condé Nast, Hearst, and other media companies for using unpaid interns, may be filing a class action lawsuit against Vice. A few former interns received letters from the firm notifying them of the investigation. Vice began paying interns $10

Jonathan Shainin Jonathan Shainin, an editor of the New Yorker website, is moving to London to edit a new section in the Guardian’s print and online editions. The McSweeney’s archive, which the Ransom Center in Texas acquired last year, is now open for research. Prizes, prizes everywhere: The New York Press Club awards have been announced, with Stephen Brill winning the Gold Keyboard, the most prestigious honor. In England, the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction recognizes Eimear McBride for her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing; and in Spain, John Banville takes home the Prince of Asturias

Darcey Steinke The New Yorker’s love-themed summer fiction issue includes stories by Rachel Kushner, David Gilbert, Karen Russell, and Ramona Ausubel. The lineup looks good, but the video “preview” is twee and pointless. James Joyce’s eyesight worsened because he had syphilis, a scholar claims. The smoking gun is apparently a medication he was prescribed, galyl, a combination of arsenic and phosphorus that was exclusively used to treat the disease. Rebecca Solnit celebrates the #yesallwomen hashtag, and connects it to a handful of recently coined terms describing elements of women’s experience. The new language marks a turning point in feminism,

Ayesha Siddiqi The New Inquiry announces that Ayesha Siddiqi, who recently left Buzzfeed Ideas, will be succeeding Rachel Rosenfelt as the online magazine’s new editor in chief. The Supreme Court has refused an appeal by the New York Times reporter James Risen, who was subpoenaed to testify in a criminal case against a former CIA officer. Risen is resisting on the grounds that he has the right to protect his sources’ identities. At the Guardian, James Camp explains BookCon: “BEA is for the book people: for three days, identified by booth or badge, they had sat or milled and done

Ruth Franklin For those of you who missed BookExpo America (or who were there but fear you missed something), Publisher’s Weekly has rounded up the 2014 convention’s big books. At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad wonders if Seymour Hirsh aided Syria with “unprofessional journalism.” If you’re in New York tonight, the Housing Works bookstore is hosting what promises to be an interesting roundtable, organized by VIDA, on literary biography. Participants include Jill Lepore (author of Jane Franklin), Rebecca Mead (who has written about George Eliot and Middlemarch), Ruth Franklin (who is working on a biography

A young Maya Angelou Maya Angelou died on Wednesday at the age of 86. An obituary in the New York Times praises her “directness of voice.” The Wall Street Journal says she will be “remembered above all as the ‘people’s poet.’” The LA Times calls her “a diva of American culture.” At the Poetry Foundation, read a sampling of her poems. “I want to say to you that you are graduating at a difficult time, when everything you might have taken for granted in a capitalist democracy, including certification by institutions of higher education and consequent stable employment, is more problematic than

Eduardo Galeano Gillian Flynn, the author of the much-celebrated Gone Girl, has announced that her next novel will be based on Hamlet. The book will be put out by Hogarth Shakespeare, “a project to retell the Bard’s plays for contemporary readers by well-known writers.” The Washingtonian profiles journalist Andrew Sullivan, who has returned to D.C. after an unhappy stint in New York. According to the Times, BookExpo America, which opened yesterday at Manhattan’s Javits Center, is trying to be seen as “more welcoming and fun,” by featuring “consumer-friendly attractions like the ‘Hunger Games’ quiz.” At a BookExpo event, Kirkus Reviews revealed

Edward St. Aubyn Mahbod Moghadam, one of the co-founders of Rap Genius (a website that lets users annotate rap lyrics), has resigned over annotations he made to a memoir written by Elliot Rodger, the alleged shooter of six UCSB students. Tom Lehman, the company CEO, said in a statement that Moghadam’s comments “not only didn’t attempt to enhance anyone’s understanding of the text, but went beyond that into gleeful insensitivity and misogyny. All of which is contrary to everything we’re trying to accomplish at Rap Genius.” The New Yorker’s Ian Parker profiles Edward St. Aubyn, the author of the five-book Patrick

Eduardo Galeano Margaret Atwood’s debut opera, Pauline, has opened in Vancouver. The libretto describes the life and last days of Pauline Johnson, a Canadian writer of Mohawk and British descent who died in 1913. Since its publication 43 years ago, Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of the Continent has been an anticolonialist and anticapitalist classic. Recently, the Uruguayan author reflected on the book’s limitations. “Open Veins tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said. John Wray reflects that working

Eudora Welty Time Magazine is moving to Lower Manhattan and breaking a long-standing industry taboo by beginning to sell ads on its cover. In March of 1933, a twenty-three-year-old Eudora Welty wrote a winning letter to the New Yorker asking for a job: “How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning—a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.” Also: “I recently coined a

Stefan Zweig Two reviewers, Christopher T. Fan at the New Inquiry and Diane Johnson at the New York Review of Books, discuss Chang-Rae Lee’s January novel, On Such a Full Sea, a few months after the rest of the crew. Johnson wonders why writers are attracted to dystopic fiction, “an unlovable genre with an inevitably hectoring tone.” At The Cut, Kat Stoeffel defends the use of trigger warnings, writing from the point of view of someone who used to dislike them: “I publicly joked that sappy songs required trigger warnings, and I privately complained that they were as infantilizing

Geoff Dyer Another Great Day at Sea came out yesterday. Publishers Weekly is debuting a new site, “BookLife,” devoted to self-publishing. BookLife will launch in late May, during BookExpo America. BookWriters sans BookPublishers, take note. Speaking of the BookExpo—or BEA, as it’s known—a good twenty thousand “industry folk” are expected to attend this year’s convention, which will be held May 28-31 at the Javitz Center in Manhattan. The New York Review of Books offers a grim new poem by Frederick Seidel, “Robespierre”: “There’s a wishing well in hell / Where every wish is granted. / Decapitation gets decanted. / Suppose you

Maude Newton Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary now includes the words “hashtag,” “selfie,” “tweep,” “gamification,” and, rather belatedly, “social networking.” The New York Times reports on the increasing use of trigger warnings, which flag upsetting content that may “trigger” a post-traumatic stress reaction. At UC Santa Barbara, the student government made a formal request asking that trigger warnings be used on course material, and similar requests have been made at Oberlin, Rutgers, the University of Michigan, and George Washington University. The suggestion that classic works of literature need warnings has been particularly controversial. Two examples: The Merchant of Venice, because it contains

Dan Kois Politico reports that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger fired executive editor Jill Abramson last week after concluding that she had give him misleading information about her decision to hire a new co-managing editor. According to sources, Abramson led Sulzberger to believe that she had consulted with other editors about the candidate she wanted to hire. Many have called the dismissal graceless (and some, such as Salon’s Daniel D’Addario, have said that she was fired for seeking a salary equal to that of her male predecessor, Bill Keller). It certainly has shaken up the newsroom—one staffer leaked

Natalie Nougayrède The conversation continues apace about Wednesday’s firing of Jill Abramson from her post as executive editor of the New York Times, which may have been tied to Abramson’s complaints about her compensation. At the Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen is cheered by the generally feminist tone of the response to the incident—“Not too long ago, a reader would have had to head to feminist websites (or, longer ago, zines) to find the sort of thinking now represented at some of America’s most mainstream news publications”—and at New York Magazine, Ann Friedman reflects on the difficulty of being a woman in

Jill Abramson The New York Times announced yesterday that its executive editor, Jill Abramson, is leaving. She will be replaced by her managing editor, Dean Baquet. The publisher didn’t go into detail about the reasons for the change, saying that it was “an issue of newsroom management,” but Ken Auletta reports at the New Yorker’s blog that there’s rumor that it may have had to do with Abramson’s dissatisfaction over her pay and pension benefits, which were significantly lower than that of her predecessor, Bill Keller. Abramson, who was the first female executive editor of the paper, has been described—controversially—as

Sylvère Lotringer Now that plans to renovate the New York Public Library have been canceled, its fate is unclear. Most of the research collection has been moved off-site. “Are empty stacks going to be the permanent and visible sign of the library’s recent misadventure?” wonders Caleb Crain at the New Yorker. “A few years ago, the library spent fifty million dollars restoring its façade. It’s painful to think that the money can’t be found to repair its heart.” Forbes lampoons Vox—the newish website whose mandate is to condense and distill complex news—by explaining the website in its own style. Matt

Zia Haider Rahman It’s now possible to avoid people on Twitter without actually un-following them: Witness the “mute” function, ye conflict-averse, and rejoice. Of sixty-six obituaries recently published in the Times, only seven of them were for women, according to an unofficial count done by the poet Lynne Melnick. James Wood celebrates Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel, a book “unashamed by many varieties of knowledge” that “takes for granted a capacity for both abstract and worldly thinking.” As Wood observes, “it wears its knowledge heavily, as a burden, a crisis, an injury,” asking “who gets to be called ‘educated,’ and

A page collected by Book Traces Salon reports that Amazon has been delaying shipments of books published by Hachette, claiming that readily available bestsellers by authors such as Stephen Colbert and Malcolm Gladwell will take two to three weeks to ship. As the Times explains: “Among Amazon’s tactics against Hachette, some of which it has been employing for months, are charging more for its books and suggesting that readers might enjoy instead a book from another author.” Amazon has yet to explain the slowdown, but most agree that the online megastore is attempting to assert their power and weaken