Poets and wits may lose their advantage on Twitter if people no longer have to abide by the 140-character limit (it could well happen).

The German publisher Axel Springer, which earlier this year teamed up with Politico on its make-Brussels-sexy European operation and recently lost out on a deal for the Financial Times, has just bought Business Insider for $343 million.

Speaking of Politico, you may have missed its plan to save or eat journalism over the next five years. See the founders’ memo to staff: “Our dream is a Politico journalistic presence in every capital of every state and country

The latest MacArthur “genius grants” have been announced, and the twenty-four new fellows include the writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ben Lerner, who told a reporter that getting the no-strings award, which pays out $625,000 over the course of five years, “takes away all your excuses to not be doing the most ambitious work.”

The New York Times mourns the end of “tabloid culture”: After massive layoffs, which came on September 16 “with the swiftness of a Soviet-era purge” the Daily News is completing its transformation from, as former News columnist Michael Daly put it, “a New York paper for New

In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, M Train, Patti Smith explains how she gained admittance into the Continental Drift Club, “an obscure society serving as an independent branch of the earth-science community.” She was invited to join the society, much to her surprise, after sending written requests to photograph the boots of the CDC’s founder, the explorer Alfred Wegener. “I am certain I didn’t quite meet their criteria, but I suspect that after some deliberation they welcomed me due to my abundance of romantic enthusiasm. I became an official member in 2006.”

The winners of the fifteenth

While we’re on the subject of ego and bombast, Morrissey has written a novel, and no one seems very happy about it (except perhaps those critics who got to single out its “most Morrissey lines” for ridicule). From the Guardian: “Do not read this book; do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems. All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame, for it’s hard to imagine anything this bad has been put between covers by anyone other than a vanity publisher.”

You can tell that Jorge Luis Borges never had the pleasure of crossing paths with Morrissey.

The two Al Jazeera journalists who were imprisoned in Egypt for over a year have been pardoned and released.

Turns out bookish people still like books: Print sales seem to be recovering and, as one bookstore owner tells the New York Times, “The e-book terror has kind of subsided.” The e-reading subscription service Oyster, which is shutting down, its staff apparently moving to Google, nonetheless maintains that “the phone will be the primary reading device globally over the next decade.” Whoever is right, as László Krasznahorkai pointed out last weekend at the Brooklyn Book Festival, “Devices

It’s been announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates, hailed by Toni Morrison as an intellectual heir to James Baldwin, will continue to use his powers for good—a longtime |http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/ta-nehisi-coates-superhero-comics.html?mid=twitter_vulture#|comic-book fan|, Coates is to write a new Black Panther series for Marvel, starting next spring. The character, created in 1966, was the first black superhero, and this assignment doesn’t strike Coates as a departure from his previous work: “I don’t experience the stuff I write about as weighty,” he told the New York Times. “I feel a strong need

An unauthorized biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron, Call Me Dave, is continuing to dominate headlines in the UK. Cowritten by Lord Ashcroft, a former Conservative Party treasurer and major party donor who is apparently sad about not getting the government job he was promised, the book is the source of the so-called Prosciutto Affair, which has spawned countless memes over the last couple of days. On this side of the Atlantic, some are already attempting to take the #piggate scandal seriously, and understand what it might tell us about today’s politics: “It’s a community of mutual

The Brooklyn Book Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary yesterday with a full day of author panels and other events—all of which concluded with a Ping Pong tournament, of course. Contestants included Jonathan Lethem, Fiona Maazel, PEN’s Paul Morris, Pico Iyer, Robert Christgau, Marlon James, David Simon, and Geoff Dyer, who reached the final round to play New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengraber, who had earlier in the day interviewed Salman Rushdie. Dyer won.

The poet C.K. Williams, whose many honors include a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, died yesterday. He was seventy-eight.

As of yesterday, the fiction longlist for the National Book Award is out, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life made it, as did Nell Zink’s Mislaid.

Layoffs, layoffs, everywhere (at the Daily News, the Post reports, quoting an “insider,” it’s no longer like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic so much as being “ripped in two like the Titanic just before it sank”).

If you’re looking to do a reverse Michael Derrick Hudson, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop can help.

Meanwhile, the writer Mira Jacob gave a speech at a Publishers Weeklyevent on Wednesday, but not enough publishers actually

The perks of being owned by Jeff Bezos: Amazon Prime members will now be automatic digital subscribers to the Washington Post (for an initial six-month period). That promises a big leap in readership, which, the Washingtonian notes, “plays into the Post’s grander plan of trying to become the newspaper brand for a national—and perhaps international—audience, a fight it’s in with the New York Times and USA Today.”

The Post, incidentally, |http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/16/annotated-transcript-september-16-gop-debate/#|has an annotated transcript| of last night’s Republican

After yesterday’s announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist, the bookies’ favorite is Hanya Yanagihara’s harrowing A Little Life (reviewed in Bookforum’s summer issue). It’s an interesting list: Marilynne Robinson didn’t make it, and Tom McCarthy is the only previously shortlisted writer who did; the others are Marlon James, Chigozie Obioma, Sunjeev Sahota, and Anne Tyler.

Trouble at the L.A. Times: The owner, Tribune Publishing, after firing the paper’s publisher last week over a host of internal disputes, apparently plans to save around $10 million in editorial expenses, cutting some eighty

For readers, there’s a bright side to the Best American Poetry debacle—a flood of recommendations for “actual Asian poets” (and a somewhat chilling insight into the experience of non-white writers in prestigious MFA programs). 

At New York, Christian Lorentzen mounts a masterful defense of Joan Didion from the current tendency to split her into separate Didions (and dismiss some of her best work). Lorentzen, incidentally, presents his credentials early on: “Having read that Didion used to type out Hemingway to learn how to write, in my 20s I did the same. Then I just switched to Didion. I