The New York Times magazine has a profile of the novelist Dana Spiotta, whose new book Innocents and Others, is out next month. At one point, Spiotta recalls some early advice she got from Gordon Lish, which she does appear to have taken on board in her work: ‘‘Whatever you’re trying to hide is what you need to write from. . . . Whatever you’re trying to hide is what makes you an interesting writer.’’

As the South Carolina primary approaches, it’s well worth reading Christian Lorentzen’s report from New Hampshire, if you haven’t already: “We woke before dawn and drove through the snow to

The New Yorker’s vast tome on the inner workings of the website TMZ is worth reading, if only for its portrait of a celebrity-gossip rag as a last bastion of old-school investigative reporting: Nicholas Schmidle writes that founder Harvey Levin “has trained many employees in the art of court reporting. Ben Presnell, who worked at ‘Celebrity Justice’ and, later, at TMZ, told me he spent most of his days at the Los Angeles County Municipal Courthouse, searching for new filings and trying to charm clerks into giving him information. Currently, TMZ has three reporters stationed full-time at the

Justice Antonin Scalia’s death inspired quick, informative, and eloquent responses from Supreme Court scholar Ian Millhiser (austhor of Injustices), who looks at how Scalia’s absence could affect the Court’s docket; Jonathan Chait, who argues that Scalia’s death will change “everything”; and Dave Holmes, who writes, in response to Scalia’s aggressively antigay stances: “It is a curious feeling when a man who devoted a significant chunk of his career to your oppression dies.” Some of those paying homage to Scalia—the man who provided the title “Irreparable Harm” to Renata Adler’s analysis of

MTV News is relaunching with some big-name new hires from both old- and new-media, including Grantland’s former editorial director Dan Fierman, longtime Spin author Charles Aaron, Pitchfork Review editor Jessica Hopper, political author Ana Marie Cox, and the New Republic’s Jamil Smith (among others).

The UK newspaper The Independent will publish its last print edition next month.

Gawker’s executive editor John Cook has given his writers the go-ahead to make political donations (and to write about the candidates they give to) as long as they disclose their gift. In a memo to Gawker staff,

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is to become a Broadway production, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, of The West Wing, The Newsroom, and The Social Network fame. Given Sorkin’s characteristic line on both the imaginary media and imaginary American politics, Atticus Finch is likely to remain a wise, lovable father figure in this version.

And out there in the landscape of what you might choose to call real American politics, there is reading to be done ahead of tonight’s Democratic debate, starting with Michelle Alexander’s essential piece on Hillary Clinton and race.

There’s also a guide—for

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are to be adapted for television, and the author will apparently be “working closely” with the producers on the project, which will shoot in Italy.

To our relief, Politwoops relaunched in the US just in time for last night’s New Hampshire primary, so we will no longer be missing out on any of the candidates’ deleted tweets (that phrase seems to cry out for a Nixon joke, but we don’t have it in us this morning).

Meanwhile, this account from Gawker of how Hillary Clinton’s staff arranges her press coverage is quite amazing.

While Bookforum remains proudly

Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter has organized a public marathon reading of War and Peace across more than thirty Russian cities this week: Readers include Vladimir Urin, director of the Bolshoi ballet, and the great Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda, who made Ashes and Diamonds.

Applications for the second annual Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the grant honoring the acclaimed journalist who died on assignment in Uganda in 2014, are due February 16th.

The Al Jazeera America shutdown is coming earlier than expected: The website will cease being updated at the end of this month, but you

In an interview with Bill Maher on Friday, author Gloria Steinem, who is pro–Hillary Clinton, implied that women who support Bernie Sanders are just trying to meet men. “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” But after a group of Sanders supporters started an online petition requesting that she take the statement back, Steinem issued an apology: “In a case of talk-show Interruptus, I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics,” she wrote in a Facebook

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has sent staffers a memo announcing a fairly major overhaul, including cuts in the newsroom and elsewhere: “Simply put, we keep turning things on—greater visual journalism, live news blogs, faster enterprise, podcasting, racing against an ever-growing list of new competitors on an expanding list of stories—without ever turning things off,” he writes. From now on, “everything we do must either be part of

Next Friday, February 12, Bookforum will host a Valentine’s reading at the New Museum. “Trial and Error,” a tribute to love’s vicissitudes (in previous years we’ve named it “Bad Trips,” “Wasted Youth,” and “The Night We Called it a Day”), will feature readings by Mary Gaitskill, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Marx, A. O. Scott, and Christopher Sorrentino.

No one seems quite ready to believe that Amazon now plans to open hundreds of physical bookstores, but if you’re on the west coast, weren’t put off by that New York Times story, and have “the ability to lift 50 lbs,” you might just have a shot at

Christopher Cox, who was promoted to editor in chief of Harper’s just three months ago, has been abruptly fired by the publisher and president, John R. MacArthur, seemingly over Cox’s support of a plan to redesign the magazine’s cover. The rest of the staff reportedly opposed the firing of Cox, who has done great work in his several years at the magazine. Roger D. Hodge, a previous editor of Harper’s who was fired in 2010 after a four-year tenure, told the New York Times that he too had had conflict with MacArthur over editorial matters, and that he warned Cox when he took the job “that he

If you can take your eyes off the The New Yorker has a review of Frederick Seidel’s new book of “suave and vengeful” poems: “If the id had an id, and it wrote poetry, the results might sound like Widening Income Inequality (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Frederick Seidel’s sixteenth collection. . . . American poets like to think of their art as open, democratic, all-­embracing; few aside from Seidel have imagined the lyric poem to be an exclusive haunt of self-flattering, hedonistic élites. Seidel is securely on the winner’s side of the widening wealth gap; the implication, if we’re reading him,