Lydia Davis At Vanity Fair, James Wolcott looks at rise of “name-brand journalists” like Arianna Huffington, Malcolm Gladwell, Ezra Klein, and Nate Silver, and wonders if their enterprises are sustainable: “The demands of being a byline superhero can spread a journalist’s time and focus so thin—all those honoraria to collect!—that he or she may start serving up skimpily researched quickies or, worse, sloppy seconds.” A report on the lack of persons of color in children’s books. The Quarterly Conversation’s spring issue is dedicated to Lydia Davis, including articles and reviews of the American short short-story writer and translator. Among many

Bill Knott The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night. The winners are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (fiction), Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (nonfiction), Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog (poetry), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (criticism), Amy Wilentz’s Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (autobiography), and Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift (biography). Nate Silver talks about the relaunch of his FiveThirtyEight blog, which goes live Monday afternoon. The poet Bill Knott has died. The author of numerous collections and chapbooks, many of them hand-made, Knott often shunned mainstream recognition: Though he was

Jessica Valenti Hugh Eakin reports on the Lahore LitFest in Pakistan. Lahore is a city “under siege.” Terrorist attacks led many intellectuals to leave, and security threats have caused international diplomats to abandon the area. “Checkpoints have become common, blackouts are frequent. And so it was that a group of Lahori intellectuals decided to fight back in the way they best know how: with words and books and open debate.” Author Joe McGinnis died on Monday at the age of 71. McGinnis was the author of The Selling of the President and, perhaps most famously, the true-crime blockbuster Fatal

Benjamin Kunkel The Moth has announced that it will honor Zadie Smith with the 2014 Moth Award at its 13th annual gala on May 13. Journalist Matthew Power has died at age 39 while on assignment in Uganda. The Times reports that the cause of death was probably heat stroke. Harper’s Magazine has granted free access to all of Power’s work for that publication; his work can also be found at Men’s Journal; the VQR; and Longreads. In a New York magazine profile, n+1 editor and author Benjamin Kunkel discusses his forthcoming book essays, Utopia or Bust, his move from novelist

Andrew Solomon John Cook is leaving his post as editor of chief of Gawker to head The Intercept, a digital magazine founded by eBay guru Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar’s First Look Media company has scooped up a number of high-profile journalists lately, including Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras. The New York Times is launching a new blog, The Upshot, to replace Nate Silver’s popular Times site of stats-based political reporting. The Upshot will have about 15 journalists, with an aim of, “Trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational

Nate Silver Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog will relaunch next week under the ESPN umbrella. Silver, a statistician known for his election predictions and great fantasy baseball cheat-sheets, recently left the New York Times after his three-year contract expired. In a Guardian profile, Mary-Kay Wimers, the editor of the London Review of Books, talks about the magazine’s growing influence (and its most controversial pieces), the importance of artful long-form essays, and the lack of female bylines at her publication. Teju Cole on his “guilty” reading pleasures: “No guilt. I read many kinds of things, but my deepest happiness is in reading

Scott McClanahan Last week, the Times revealed that the author behind the anonymous Twitter account GSElevator, which purported to print conversations overheard on the elevator at Goldman Sachs, was one John LeFevre, who has never worked at Goldman Sachs and currently lives in Texas. Many wondered what would become of the author’s forthcoming book Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, which was recently purchased by Simon Schuster for a six-figure sum. Wonder no more: Simon Schuster has dropped the book. And what about the advance? In an email to Publishers

Heather Havrilesky The n+1 editors weigh in on Ukraine, Putin, and the West: “There’s a reason Ukraine is at the heart of the most significant geopolitical crisis yet to appear in the post-Soviet space. There is no post-Soviet state like it.” Fifteen years ago, John le Carre revealed that his recurring character George Smiley was based on John Bingham, who, like leCarre, was a real-life spy who worked for Britain’s intelligence agency MI5 and later went on to become a writer. A critic recently claimed that “Bingham detested Mr. le Carre’s opinions of the espionage game.” In a letter

Matt Buchanan The Awl has hired two editors—John Herrman, who currently works at Buzzfeed, and Matt Buchanan, who currently works at the New Yorker—to run the site. “We’ll introduce them in more detail down the road, but they’re really lovely, thoughtful, curious and smart—and also they’re total weirdos.” Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, has been hired as a columnist by the Washington Times. Listen to Jennifer Egan read Mary Gaitskill’s story “The Other Place” in this month’s New Yorker fiction podcast. Brian Eno has put together a reading list of his “20 Essential Books for sustaining civilization.” Along with War and Peace

Ansel Elkins On Friday, one Mark Ames posted a story on PandoDaily in which he investigated Pierre Omidyar’s contributions to Ukraine revolutionary groups. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, is bankrolling the much-talked-about First Look Media. What does this say about First Look? Not much, says Glenn Greenwald, one of First Look’s top editors. Greenwald responded that the activities of the Omidyar Network “have no effect whatsoever on my journalism or the journalism of The Intercept. That’s because we are guaranteed full editorial freedom and journalistic independence.” The New Yorker takes a look at a 1979 novel that foresaw the

Juliet Macur David Remnick has posted an article about the upheaval in the Ukraine, and about Putin’s invasion of Crimea, at the New Yorker’s website. “Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse.” Yesterday, the Sports section of the New York Times ran an excerpt of sportswriter Juliet Macur’s new book Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, which will be released this week. The excerpt states that by 1993, Armstrong was preparing for his races by using “the blood booster EPO, human growth hormone, blood

In light of the controversy about The Observer’s recent piece about New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman (considered a Trump-ordered takedown by many), Jack Shafer writes: “If an editor can’t commission a hatchet job, or at the very least encourage a reporter to take a preferred direction, what’s the point of being an editor? Excessive fairness provides only one path to truth, and one man’s smear is often another man’s exuberant truth-telling.” Meanwhile, Gawker has uncovered emails showing just how the story developed, concluding that it was motivated, at least in part, by Schneiderman’s hostility toward Trump. As

Leon Wieseltier The New Republic’s literary editor Leon Wieseltier is no fan of New Republic senior editor John Judis’s book Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Wieseltier praised a negative review of Judis’s book, calling it “tendentious, imprecise, and sometimes risibly inaccurate” (among other things). A movie of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn starring and directed by Edward Norton will begin filming in New York later this year. March Madness for bookworms begins next week, with the Morning News Tournament of Books. The brackets will be judged by novelist Jami Attenberg, novelist-critic Roxane Gay, and

Stieg Larsson Late last month, the Goldman Sachs employee behind the Twitter account GS Gossip—which publishes comments overheard in the firm’s elevator—sold his insider’s account of Wall Street culture to Simon Schuster for six figures. The book, tentatively titled Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, is scheduled to be released in October 2014. But there might be a problem. At the Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that the author, John Lefevre, “doesn’t work at the firm. And he never did.” The Observer defends its recent piece about New York State

Carl Van Vechten The VIDA count for 2013 has been released. Carl Van Vechten was a New York socialite, a “best-selling writer of scandalous novels,” connoisseur of American literature, and a champion of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes. He was also a photographer, and shot portraits of thousands of cultural figures. At the FSG blog, Edward White, the author of The Tastemaker, posts and writes detailed captions for fifteen Van Vechten photographs—of Harry Belafonte, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, W.E.B. DuBois, and others. At Bookslut, the shortlist for the Daphne award, a reconsideration of the

Jessica Gross Writer Alexander Chee recently said that he found trains to be great places to write. “I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers,” Chee remarked. Amtrak is now granting his wish. Amtrak has plans to offer some writers free round-trip tickets. In fact, the program has already started: Jessica Gross has taken the “test run” residency. When New York magazine announced that it would become a biweekly last December, a press release promised a more “ambitious” print publication. At the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner takes a look at the first issue of the new New York, and finds

Matt Taibbi First Look Media, the online journalism company funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has hired Matt Taibbi to head a new magazine about politics and finance. Earlier this month, First Look founded its first digital publication, The Intercept, which will produce stories based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The Wikipedia Books Project is raising money in hopes of printing the online encyclopedia in book form, a project that will reach 1,000 volumes of roughly 1,200 pages each. Over the weekend, Anne Rice, the bestselling author of vampire novels and books about Jesus Christ, used Facebook to

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Americanah, has penned an essay speaking out against the anti-gay law in Nigeria, calling for its repeal: “We cannot legislate into existence a world that does not exist: the truth of our human condition is that we are a diverse, multi-faceted species. The measure of our humanity lies, in part, in how we think of those different from us.” Rick Perlstein has just announced a new book to be published this summer, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the third volume in his history

Mavis Gallant Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant, who spent much of her adult life in Paris, died on Tuesday morning at the age of 91. Gallant was best-known in the US for stories published in the New Yorker (she wrote more than one hundred tales for them over the years). In 2013, the magazine’s fiction podcast featured Margaret Atwood reading and discussing Gallant’s story “Voices Lost in Snow,” and in 2007, Antonya Nelson read “When We Were Nearly Young.” Gallant’s work was collected in one volume in 1996, and the New York Review of Books have published several

Laura Poitras Facebook has tweaked its algorithm it uses to determine what appears in its news feeds, and it’s geared to encourage readers to share more “high-quality news content.” The George Polk Awards in Journalism were announced on Sunday, with Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman winning for their NSA stories, which used documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Other winners included Andrea Elliott, for her heartbreaking five-part portrait of a homeless child in New York, and Pete Hamill, who won a career-achievement prize. At the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien considers David O. Russell’s