Last week, the New York Times issued a letter claiming that Slavoj Zizek plagiarized himself in his Op-Ed “ISIS Is a True Disgrace to Fundamentalism,” which ran in the paper on September 3. According the the Times retraction, the Op-Ed recycles entire passages from Zizek’s 2008 book Violence. But now it seems the Times has withdrawn the retraction: It’s nowhere to be found on the paper’s website.

The dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism has proposed that students pay $10,250 a year in addition to their annual tuition, which is approximately $15K for

Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta, has finished a million-word novel. “I’m not averse to some kind of ebook, eventually,” he said. “As long as I get my huge, cripplingly heavy book to put on my shelf and gloat over, I’ll be happy.”

Spin Media laid off nineteen employees and ended the print magazine Vibe, which it acquired last year.

James Franco’s latest book, Hollywood Dreaming, drops this month. It’s a collection of poems, short stories, and paintings that describe the evolution of his career in Hollywood.

Guernica has a new column about politics and fiction. The first columnist is

Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both made into plays in London, may come to the New York stage as well. Broadway producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel are in talks with producers in London, with plans to mount Wolf Hall: Parts 1 and 2 in the spring.

The New Inquiry's September issue is called "Back to School." Read the editor's note here.

Rahel Aima has joined TNI as a contributing editor.

At the New Yorker’s Page-Turner, Elif Batuman considers the shift, over the past decade, from irony to awkwardness, and decides that all awkwardness is at bottom familial.

Forbes has compiled a list of the highest-earning writers this year. James Patterson is in first place, earning $90 million. Gillian Flynn, the author of the “literary thriller” Gone Girl, is in 12th place, at $9 million.

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced, and includes Joshua Ferris, Richard Flanagan, Karen Joy Fowler, Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee, and Ali Smith.

A hacker claims to have taken over the email account of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and is promises to release Nakamoto’s “secrets” if someone will pay him 25 bitcoins, or $12,000. A head administrator

Jenny Diski, one of the London Review of Books’ best critics, has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. The lovely and devastating first installment of what will be a regular diary about her illness describes the “pre-ordained banality” that comes along with the diagnosis, and the difficulty of writing about a subject whose outlines are so oppressively familiar. “I can’t avoid the cancer clichés simply by rejecting them,” she realizes. “Rejection is conditioned by and reinforces the existence of the thing I want to avoid. I choose how to respond and behave, but a choice between doing this or

Benny Johnson, the Buzzfeed staffer who was fired for plagiarism this summer, has been hired as a social media director at the National Review.

At the New York Review of Books blog, Masha Gessen has posted an interesting essay about Russia’s recent population dip. In the past two decades, the number of people has fallen by almost seven million people (5 percent). The main cause is lower life expectancy. But why are Russians dying at an earlier age now than they were during Soviet rule? Is it violence, vodka, “lack of hope”?

Poynter points out an error in the New York Times’s Joan Rivers obit.

Teju Cole, the author of Open City and a 4,000-word essay about immigration (composed entirely of Tweets), talks with Foreign Policy magazine about US drone policy, Nigerian corruption, and "hashtag activism."

Vice Media, which has announced that A&E networks has invested $250 million in the company, has announced another $250 million investment, this one from a venture capital firm called Technology Crossover Ventures.

The New Republic celebrates its centennial this fall, with a gala, an anthology, and a special issue; the publication’s website is also featuring one-hundred notable articles

USA Today has laid off between 60 and 70 staffers—about half of them editors and writers, according to Jim Romenesko. “Today is my last day at USA TODAY, after 30 years,” Edna Gundersen, the paper’s longtime pop critic, tweeted yesterday. “I was laid off this morning, along with several great colleagues. Onward.”

David Remnick has responded to environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who recently fired off a harsh rebuttal to Michael Specter’s profile of her in the August 18 New Yorker. “Part of the problem is that after encouraging Mr. Specter to travel with you both in Italy and India, you

Yesterday, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that Frederick J. Ryan Jr.—a onetime Reagan-administration staffer and currently Politico’s first chief executive—will be replacing Katharine Weymouth as publisher of the paper. This is the first time that the Post will not be headed by a member of the Graham family since 1933, when Weymouth’s great-grandfather Eugene Meyer bought the paper.

At The Atlantic, a story about Paul Moran, who systematically dug through and took items from John Updike’s trash for three years, beginning in 2006. Moran has blogged about his finds at The Other John

Our fall issue is out now, with Christian Lorentzen on Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Christopher Caldwell on Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, Emily Gould on perfume nerds, and more.

Amazon angers Japanese publishers.

Clive Thompson on the benefits of taming “the tyranny of 24/7” email.

At the New Yorker, an |about:blank|essay| about Tillie Olsen focuses on her 1934 pieceThe Strike (written when she was named Tillie Lerner), which aligns her struggles as an author with the battles that Great Depression workers fought. Olsen was influenced by the work of modernists like Gertrude Stein and Virginia

New York magazine rounds up the books to look forward to this fall, including Ben Lerner’s much-anticipated novel, 10:04, which publishes next week, Lena Dunham’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, as well as new fiction from Martin Amis, Marilynne Robinson, and Denis Johnson.

Rene Steinke runs down six great books about Texas that go beyond “cattle and cowboys.”

Jonathan Guyer on pulp fiction and graphic novels in Egypt: “When President Hosni Mubarak breezed off . . . the police dusted, too, leaving behind a Wild West.” Now, in Cairo, “as authorities attempt to restore law and order, the crime

Following the sale of the Canada-based scientific publication Experimental & Clinical Cardiology to New York buyers who turned around and sold it to a group in Switzerland that nobody can seem to identify, the journal is “now publishing anything submitted along with a fee of $1,200, packaging spurious studies as serious scientific papers.”

At the New Yorker, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard responds to her sexist detractors. On Twitter trolls and online commenters: “The more I’ve looked at the details of the threats and the insults that women are on the receiving end of, the more some of them