The New York Times has a rare interview with the reclusive Italian writer Elena Ferrante. “My women are strong, educated, self-aware and aware of their rights,” Ferrante says, “but at the same time subject to unexpected breakdowns, to subservience of every kind, to mean feelings. I’ve also experienced this oscillation. I know it well, and that also affects the way I write.”

Future editions of Lena Dunham’s recent book, Not That Kind of Girl, will come with a note saying that “Barry” is not the real name of a character Dunham says raped her at Oberlin. A former student—whose actual name is

According to The Onion the Pew Research Center, "Americans feel better informed thanks to the Internet."

The Pulitzer Prize committee has expanded eligibility in two categories, investigative reporting and feature writing, to online and print magazines. They will also allow organizations to nominate journalists “employed by partnering organizations” even if the organizations are ineligible themselves.

Vice held a suitably bacchanalian party for its twentieth anniversary.

The Guardian profiles Jenny Diski, who has been writing riveting diaries about her inoperable lung cancer for the London

Conflicting reactions to the mass editorial exodus at the New Republic continue to emerge. At Slate, Seth Stevenson describes the backlash against TNR owner Chris Hughes, as well as the backlash against the backlash. At Vox, Ezra Klein suggests that the TNR, though long important, needs some kind of change: Under the leadership of new editor Gabriel Snyder, the revamped TNR, he points out, “won't be what The New Republic was. And that's because the thing The New Republic was has already died.” Max Fisher considers TNR’s “race problem,” and points out that “to my knowledge, not one of

On Friday,

Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier are both leaving the New Republic, Foer to be replaced by Gabriel Snyder. (You can read the memos in question here.) Many have greeted the news as the end of an era; some gleefully (“Let the old guard die off,” more or less) and others with dismay. This morning, a rash of further resignations came: nine senior editors, the executive editor, the legal affairs editor, the digital media editor, the poetry editor, the dance editor, and fifteen contributing editors. The only senior editors not to have resigned are Evgeny Morozov, Rebecca Traister, and Brian Beutler.

In New York, a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer who put Eric Garner in the chokehold that killed him. It would be astonishing and enraging under any circumstances, but it’s even more so coming so closely on the heels of the Saint Louis grand jury that failed to bring charges against Darren Wilson. Thousands of protesters gathered in Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and Union Square after the announcement, and succeeded in blocking traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel, Brooklyn Bridge, and R.F.K. Bridge. Eighty-three people were arrested. This evening there

At Page-Turner, Adelle Waldman reconsiders the traditional novel. It’s “fashionable” to think of it as over, or to suppose that memoir and autobiographical novels are the only way forward. But the form offers possibilities that nonfiction and autobiography do not. Among them, it allows the writer subjects that aren’t herself: “Channeling people other than the author also makes possible the presentation of multiple consciousnesses, enabling novels to capture some of the populous cacophony of real life.”

Raymond Chandler wrote a libretto to a comic opera, The Princess and the Pedlar. The work

The Times has announced its notable books list for 2014.

Our new issue is out and, we submit, it’s kind of special. To celebrate our twentieth anniversary, we invited current and former contributors—including Geoff Dyer, Christian Lorentzen, Christine Smallwood, Lydia Davis, Luc Sante, J. Hoberman, Chris Kraus, and many others—to write about notable books of the past twenty years. Meanwhile, Heather Havrilesky points out the best-seller list’s spectacular mansplaining, Melanie Rehak reflects on the Brooklynification of all food, and Christopher Lyon picks out the best art books. You can get

At Al Jazeera America, Bookforum’s Chris Lehmann calls out progressives for failing to respond to the grand jury decision in Ferguson last week. “It speaks volumes about the anorexic state of liberal moral reasoning in today’s America that it has met the failure of a grand jury to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the Aug. 9 killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown with little more than a procedural shrug. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the system has worked, liberals intone.”

At the new site the Toast, Roxane Gay writes about the Ferguson grand

Yesterday ABC’s George Stephanopoulos conducted the first interview with Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown. Wilson told Stephanopoulos that he “would not do anything differently that day”; that he was just “doing his job,” and that he has a “clean conscience.” Wilson may, God forbid, be reporting his feelings honestly, but he can't possibly be doing so with his account of what happened. A source from NBC, who was also bidding for the interview, said that ABC payed in the mid-to-high six figures for the interview.

At the New Yorker, a reminder that the Ferguson prosecutor, Robert

Last night, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to bring charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown. The demonstrations against the decision are righteous and angry and ongoing. Here's Raven Rakia on what gets called a protest and what gets called a riot. The key difference? Who is protesting and where, not what they're doing. "Violence is a realistic factor, and sometimes, a tactic, in all of these protests. Resisting is never peaceful. If the State fears you, it will crack down on you violently."

Color of Change, an online civil rights organization started

The passwords we use say a great deal about us and often have elaborate histories. At the New York Times, a story about these “tchotchkes of our inner lives” that commemorate what is important to us—“a motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar.”

Laura Poitras has received the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for her reporting on the NSA and Edward Snowden. Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!,” received a lifetime achievement award.

New York Magazine has rolled out a series of “pop-up

Daniel Handler made some flat-footed and racist jokes while hosting Wednesday’s National Book Awards event. It’s no fun to watch. He apologized yesterday on Twitter, but the bad taste lingers. As Roxane Gay put it: “It's not one off color joke, it's the sum of all of them, everywhere, from the people you are most inclined to like and love.”

Recover from the embarrassment of watching Handler by watching Louise Glück, who accepted her award with endearing emotion. She thanked her colleagues in poetry, “who have more times than I can say astonished me and moved me and filled me with the envy that