In the second media surprise of the week, Al Jazeera America, which employs hundreds of people, has abruptly announced that it will close down all operations in April.

“As things get worse,” Eileen Myles says to Ana Marie Cox in an interview, “poetry gets better, because it becomes more necessary.” Myles also notes that “if the voters rose up with a write-in campaign, then of course” she would make a second run for the presidency. Seems fair to say we need her more than ever.

The shortlist is up for this year’s “moronic, informative, all-consuming, fascinating, weirdly fun” Tournament of

You can read the text of last night’s State of the Union address here.

After considering candidates for nearly a year, the New York Times has chosen Jim Rutenberg (currently chief political correspondent for the Times magazine) as the successor to its beloved media columnist David Carr.

And the new owner of the Village Voiceis rehiring editor in chief Will Bourne, who quit a couple of years ago after only a few months because he was unwilling to fire more good people.

Critic and Bookforum contributor Parul Sehgal has a new column in the New York Times Book Review, and begins with a piece on

Writers from Hilton Als to Marlon James responded yesterday to the loss of the inimitable David Bowie, and many recalled the books he loved most. (In a 1998 Proust questionnaire, Bowie’s answers, respectively, to “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” and “What is the quality you most like in a man?” were “Reading,” and ”The ability to return books.”)

Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes has announced that running a magazine (or finding “a workable business model” for one) is a lot harder than he’d hoped: “After investing a great deal of time, energy, and over $20 million,” he wrote yesterday

Aside from everything else you could say about David Bowie—surely one of the greatest shapeshifting pop stars in history—he also had excellent taste in literature. Via Electric Lit, here's a list of Bowie's one hundred favorite books. And from the 2011 volumeDavid Bowie: Any Day Now, The London Years 1947–1974, a few images of the starman from his late 1960s and early '70s heyday:

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Glancing back: In 2015, Amazon’s stock prices went up 117 percent and the Educational Development Corp’s stock prices went up 128 percent, creating a jump in publishing-industry share prices. Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble’s stocks fell 26 percent. Looking ahead: the News & Observer offers predictions for 2016—“Paper is popular, science fiction rises, long-form nonfiction dips.”

The New York Times does not call Sean Penn’s meeting with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, unethical, but it does raise the question. Penn’s article about the drug lord was published this

The Fales Library & Special Collections at NYU, known for its unique materials on Riot Grrrl and the Downtown New York scene, has acquired Chris Kraus’s papers, including her personal diaries—the source material for novels that ingeniously combined theory, fiction, and autobiography—and her correspondence as founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint, as well as film and video footage from her time as a filmmaker in New York in the 1980s and ‘90s. “Dear Dick,” Kraus wrote, in her groundbreaking 1997 epistolary novel I Love Dick, “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become

The celebrated poet Anne Carson is branching out into short stories—there’s one in the New Yorker this week, and another in Harper’s Magazine.

As writers struggle to make anything you might call a living, Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and current president of the UK’s Society of Authors, has asked British publishers to offer fairer contractual terms: “We authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonising the internet with

It seems that Lee Bo, the latest of five Hong Kong booksellers to have gone missing recently, may be being held by authorities in mainland China. CNN cites one source as suggesting that a publisher Lee and the others are connected to “had been planning on publishing a book about the ‘love affairs’ of China's President Xi Jinping during his time working ‘in the provinces.’”

To make amends for its infamous “80 Books Every Man Should Read” list—”What can we say? We messed up”—Esquire greets the new year with a new list, selected by women including Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, Anna Holmes, and Sloane

Only a couple of years after winning the Costa novel award for Life After Life, Kate Atkinson has received it again for the sequel, A God in Ruins, making her the first writer ever to win three Costa prizes.

Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin adds her voice to the conversation about Claire Vaye Watkins’s “On Pandering” and Marlon James’s assertion that white women’s tastes shape the publishing industry: “It is easier to complain about the power you don’t have than to think about how you are exerting the power you do have. And fighting for your own rights is not the same as fighting for equality.

A British intelligence file kept secret until last week reveals that President Reagan boned up for his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1986 nuclear-disarmament talks in Iceland by reading Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising. The president thought Clancy’s Cold War thriller, which imagines events leading up to World War III, explained the Soviet Union so well that he strongly urged Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to read it too. 

Tired of home-delivery problems, editors and reporters at the Boston Globe decided to deliver thousands of copies of the paper themselves on Sunday. The paper

Reporters without Borders has published one of the bleaker year-end reports, pointing out that 110 journalists were killed in 2015. The reasons for some of the deaths remain unknown, but it has been confirmed that at least sixty-seven of the journalists “were targeted because of their work or were killed while reporting.”

At Variety, Thelma Adams looks at the problem of gender disparity in film criticism.

The Barnes and Noble Review hasn’t been sending its regular newsletters this month, which has apparently caused some to wonder if the online publication is on the rocks. But Mary Ellen

2015 was an eventful year in media that saw the death of David Carr, the introduction of the New York Times’s virtual-reality app, the groundbreaking Caitlyn Jenner Vanity Fair cover, and Jon Stewart’s departure from TheDaily Show. The Observer rounds up the year’s biggest media stories, and looks ahead to the stories we’ll be hearing about in the new year.

A Barnes and Noble in New York is applying for a liquor license. Perhaps they are celebrating the news that print is not dead?

The New York Times Magazine’s “The Lives They Lived” feature, which offers remembrances of notable people who