Vice’s editorial staff has voted to unionize, following quickly in the footsteps of writers and editors at Gawker media and Salon. In a statement, Vice CEO Shane Smith responded to the vote with grandiose paternal affection: “I’m so proud of all my perfect diamonds here at Vice. Every single day your ideas and work continue to blow me away. I am proud to support all of you—and as an old grey-haired man all I want is for my beautiful Vice family to be happy—those writers who voted to unionize and those who did not. I love you all, and together we will conquer the world." The Writers Guild of

It's not easy to out-drama-queen Donald Trump (whose unexpected success in the presidential race has inspired publisher Thomas Dunne to hurry a new biography into print), but Rand Paul and Chris Christie seem to have managed it at last night's debate.

You probably noticed that Melville House has brought out the Pope's encyclical on climate change as a book. But you may not know that Pope Francis is now also a Verso author. You can get hold of his latest work, hailed as "an urgent call to action," here for free—and you won't want to miss it.

Clickbait with a cause: Gaza gets the Buzzfeed

Thanks to a lawsuit by the Guardian, more information has now emerged about the “off-the-books interrogation compound” in Chicago’s Homan Square—we now know that more than 3,500 people have been detained there, “82% of whom a Guardian independent investigation found to be black,” and there have been “only three documented visits from lawyers to the building since September 2004.”

The New Yorker seems to be bringing out the big guns on TMZ, with a long report by Nicholas Schmidle, better known for his pieces on bin Laden and war crimes in Kosovo. TMZ employees (former and current) were warned

The historian Robert Conquest has died. Best known for his work on Stalin’s purges, he was also a Movement poet who edited sci-fi anthologies and collaborated on a novel with his friend Kingsley Amis—and apparently now and then got credit for one of Amis’s “jokes.”

The political cartoonist Ted Rall, dropped by the Los Angeles Times after the LAPD disputed his account of being “roughed up” by an officer in 2001, has had an audio recording of the incident cleaned up and is considering a lawsuit (against both the Times and the police).

Note to redditors: Apparently doxxing is OK as long as you

Jason Fine, the current editor of Men’s Journal, will be the new managing editor of Rolling Stone, taking over from Will Dana, with whom publisher Jann Wenner says he has had “a conscious uncoupling” after the magazine’s difficulties over its retracted UVA article.

The once-scrappy Charlie Hebdo doesn’t know what to do with all its money.

The new venture from veteran entertainment journalist Nikki Finke (she of Deadline Hollywood) has gone live. “Once you get past F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara,” she told Jezebel, there are not nearly enough short stories about Hollywood, so she’s decided

Etger Keret’s new book, The Seven Good Years, is a collection of personal essays about life in Israel, but there are currently no plans to publish it in Hebrew, or in his home country. Keret—whose previous work has consisted mostly of short, whimsical, and surreal fiction—recently told the Guardian that he wrote the book for people outside the country. He explains: “If I talk about going to a maternity ward with my wife and all the medics are with people from a bombing, for an Israeli person that is so normal that it hardly merits any attention.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates lists the ten books he couldn’t

Emergency staff take over at Gawker: Leah Beckman steps up as editor-in-chief, Hamilton Nolan steps in as her deputy, and John Cook has agreed (apparently after some hesitation) to be the new executive editor. The International Business Times got hold of Cook’s reassuring memo to the troops: “I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s a— and say we’ve weathered the storm and hop on board we’re headed to victory. But we are all still here . . . and we have at our disposal—right now, at your fingertips—an immense and powerful machine for illuminating, skewering, praising, and changing the world

Political cartoonist and author Ted Rall—who has written books about Afghanistan and Edward Snowden—has announced on his blog that he has been fired by the Los Angeles Times, where he has been a regular contributor since 2009. The reason for the firing, says editorial-page editor Nicholas Goldberg, is a cartoon that Rall published in the paper in May, in which the artist recalled being handcuffed and roughed up by the LAPD after he was stopped for jaywalking. According to Goldberg, the LAPD has provided evidence that it did not mistreat Rall: “An audiotape of the encounter recorded by the police

The Booker Prize longlist has just been announced.

The New York Times rebuts the New York Review of Books’s rebuttal (by a Times journalist turned day spa owner) of their nail-salon exposé.

Amazon—or Relentless, as it was originally to be called—now has plans to reserve a two-hundred-foot slice of airspace for its drones.

As migrants cross the border from the Dominican Republic, Edwidge Danticat writes from Haiti.

Ursula K. Le Guin has started an online forum for writers of fiction, where she plans to answer questions about craft (or open them to the floor) every other Monday. She claims

For those who like their New York Times It’s hard to look away from New York magazine’s cover story on thirty-five of Bill Cosby’s accusers, but some hackers did their best to help with that.

Anyone who doesn’t like the idea of a softened-up Gawker has been invited to take the money and get out: William Arkin, former national security adviser to the New York Times and founder of Gawker’s national security spin-off, was asked to go and had some things to say about it. Leah Finnegan—also ex-NYT—is leaving too.

“Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways and the viewer is complicit in that assault.

The British education organization Pearson, which sold the Financial Times last week, has confirmed that it plans to sell its 50 percent stake in The Economist magazine. According to Politico, “Existing Economist shareholders led by John Elkann, heir to the Italian Agnelli industrial fortune and a member of the magazine’s board, are working on a potential buyout of Pearson’s stake.” If that plan falls through, “one option under discussion is for an investment bank to purchase the remaining shares to allow Pearson to cash out.”

Don Winslow’s The Cartel, which came out in late June, is a novel

Pearson, the education and publishing giant, You can |http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535865/flip-side-by-james-franco-and-david-shields/#|already pre-order| Flip-Side: Real and Imaginary Conversations with Lana Del Rey, the latest provocation by Renaissance man James Franco, for whom just publishing a single LDR-themed poem apparently wasn’t nearly enough. His co-author is David Shields of Reality Hunger fame. If the concept doesn’t seem promising, perhaps you’re forgetting this special issue of The New Inquiry; come to think of it, we could all do worse than to reread that, and leave