How to Cook Everything author Mark Bittman announced on Saturday that he’s leaving the New York Times, where he has been a food columnist for almost five years. The author, whose work for the Times has helped Americans eat food that is better for their health and for the environment, says that he will be taking “a central role in a year-old food company, to do what I’ve been writing about these many years: to make it easier for people to eat more plants.” He does not reveal the name of his new employer.

In a new interview, novelist and essayist Aleksandar Hemon, who was visiting the US when

At the New Republic, Michael Eric Dyson traces the development of the “black digital intelligentsia.”

On the Harper’s blog this week, Art Winslow claimed to have discovered the new Thomas Pynchon—or rather, the old one, using a pseudonym to publish Cow Country, a long and until now unsung novel that came out earlier this year. But now the spoilsports at New York magazine’s Vulture blog have gone and asked Penguin, who said: “We are Thomas Pynchon's publisher and this is not a book by Thomas Pynchon.”

Wayne Koestenbaum talked to Sarah Gerard about “sexualized formalist curiosity” and his

The National Geographic Society has teamed up with Fox on a new for-profit media venture that will include its existing cable television channels and the famous magazine (Fox paid $725 million and will own 73 percent of the new company; the Society itself will remain a nonprofit, with a larger endowment). Rupert Murdoch isn’t fazed by those who object to the idea of a “climate-change denier” having such a major stake in the National Geographic—in any case, he prefers the term “skeptic.”

Padgett Powell talks to Powells.com about Cries For Help, Various: Stories. “Well, it's not the original

If you were wondering who’d come off better in a disagreement on feminism between Erica Jong and Roxane Gay, here’s your answer.

It seems Gawker Media will let you get away with saying almost anything on its sites, as long as you’re not paying to do so. Vox reports that Jezebel’s advertising team recently refused to run an ad in support of abortion rights, saying: "While Jezebel’s editorial content is very feminist, our advertising management team tends to be more conservative on the advertising we can accept." Vox notes “a certain irony” in the idea of a website that will “run controversial

Next year, novelist-critic Dale Peck and OR Books cofounder John Oakes will relaunch The Evergreen Review, the legendary literary quarterly founded by Barney Rosset in 1957. Oakes will be the publisher, and Peck will act as the editor in chief.

It has been revealed that Yi-Fen Chou, one of the contributors to this year’s edition of Best American Poetry, is a pseudonym that was used by Michael Derrick Hudson, a white poet who adopted the Chinese pen name because he thinks it’s a successful strategy for being published more often. Guest editor Sherman Alexie (whose list of authors is 60 percent

Several writers are to be awarded the National Humanities Medal, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Larry McMurtry, and Annie Dillard.

You’d think the Daily Mail would have grown a thicker skin by now, but in fact, DailyMail.com is suing Gawker for publishing some mean things about its editorial model (in the words of James King, a former freelance news writer for them, it involves “little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication”).

And still they come: More digital journalists announce their intention to unionize, this time at

Don DeLillo will receive this year’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He took the opportunity (via the Associated Press) to offer some career advice to other novelists: "It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between."

The New York Times magazine has a profile of Joy Williams, whose collected stories are about to be published—although she tells Dan Kois that most of them “aren’t getting close to what I’m trying to accomplish.” (Her

The author of the latest James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, has had to apologize for his bizarre suggestion that Idris Elba was not suave enough to be the next 007.

In France, the authors of a book critical of the Moroccan monarchy (originally set to come out in 2016) have been arrested and dropped by their publisher after they were caught accepting a $2.3 million bribe from one of the king’s representatives. “It’s human, no?” one of the writers, Catherine Graciet, told a French newspaper about her decision to take the money. “Everyone wonders what one could do with their life with two million

As the death toll rises for people seeking refuge in Europe, Steidl has published the last book by Günter Grass, who died in April: The book contains an exhortation to his fellow Germans to display greater compassion towards refugees.

“Why change a winning team?” asked Eula Biss’s literary agent, after they turned down a six-figure offer from a commercial house to take the paperback of On Immunity away from Graywolf Press. Boris Kachka (who notes that Graywolf authors have collected “four NBCC awards, a National Book Award, two Pulitzers, and a Nobel Prize” in the last six years) spoke to

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, died on Sunday at age 82. Sacks announced in February that he had late-stage cancer. Sacks’s books, which include Hallucinations and Awakenings and the recent memoir On the Move, captured the mysterious workings of the human brain. In his 1985 book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he wrote about a patient with a parietal-lobe tumor, who tried “to kick his own left leg out of bed under the mistaken impression that someone has placed a cold cadaver limb beside him as a practical joke.”

Jeb Bush likes bestsellers such as Robert Putnam’s Our Kids

In a New York Times op-ed, Stephen King defends prolific novelists—Alexandre Dumas, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Asimov, himself—from the “snobbish, inane, and demonstrably untrue” suspicion that fewer books make for better books.

Buzzfeed spoke to Claudia Rankine: “I wanted the book to exist in the space of the white liberal. Because people like to say ‘oh, it’s the South,’ ‘it’s ignorance,’ ‘it’s white supremacist Fox News.’ And I’m like, no, no, no. It’s white alliance with all of those things.”

Someone’s trying to revamp books and publishing again—if you know how to do that, you’re invited

At New York, Christian Lorentzen has an essay on Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, in which he joins Elaine Blair in bringing “some skepticism to the dizzy proceedings,” and also considers the Franzen phenomenon more generally: “Do you love Jonathan Franzen? Does America? Does the world? These questions sound ridiculous, but they’re the ones Franzen has been posing over the past two decades, as he has, against long odds, made himself the kind of public figure about whom they aren’t entirely ridiculous or even unusual.”

After two journalists were killed while on a routine assignment in Virginia,