A very silly lawsuit brought by Scarlett Johansson against a French novelist, Grégoire Delacourt, claims that he defamed the actress in his novel La première chose qu’on regard—in English, something like The First Thing You Look At. The character in question isn’t Johansson, but a model who resembles the actress. Nevertheless, a French judge has ruled that Delacourt owes Johansson $3,4oo for portraying her—in a work of fiction—as having had two affairs she never engaged in. Unless Johansson reads French, it’s unlikely that she’s read La première chose; it hasn’t been translated.

According to

It’s not clear how Google will be adhering to a May decision that gives European citizens the "right to be forgotten." The company restored links to two Guardian stories (about a soccer referee’s lies about a penalty decision) that it had previously removed, but has not done so with a BBC story about the ousting of Merrill Lynch CEO E. Stanley O’Neill.

The New Inquiry has launched a “flash fundraiser”: If the magazine can raise $25,000 by August 1, an anonymous donor will match the amount.

On the occasion of the British reissue of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Zadie Smith concludes that she didn’t

Vice Media is moving to a 60,000-square-foot former warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will reportedly help it add 525 more employees to its current staff of 400.

The Wall Street Journal has laid off between 20 and 40 employees in recent weeks.

Gawker has launched a new vertical, “Disputations,” which makes public the internal chatter of its employees. At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Caroline O’Donovan discusses Gawker’s desire “to take the private parts” of its writers’ “intelligence and character and turn them into monetizable content.” Will readers bite? On Twitter, NPR’s David

Carla Blumenkranz is moving from n+1, where she was managing editor, to a position as senior online editor at the New Yorker. Dayna Tortorici, currently a senior editor, will take her place.

At the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel takes on the much-discussed French economist Piketty. Capital in the 21st Century, Kunkel writes, is “more exciting considered as a failure than as a triumph.” “Piketty has bid a lingering goodbye to the latter-day marginalism of mainstream economics but has not yet arrived at the reconstructed political economy foreseen at the outset. His theoretical reach

The New York Times on a “new wave” of African writers that includes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu,Helen Oyeyemi,NoViolet Bulawayo,Teju Cole,Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Taiye Selasi. “Some writers and critics scoff at the idea of lumping together diverse writers with ties to a diverse continent. But others say that this wave represents something new in its sheer size, after a long fallow period.”

Now a decade old, the online literary magazine Guernica, which has so far relied on unpaid contributors, is hiring a new publisher, Lisa Lucas, and making plans to expand into print.

Novelist

Publisher’s Weekly’s annual report on the global publishing market has the education publisher Pearson in the top spot, with over nine billion dollars in revenue, and Random House as the world’s largest trade publisher, making around three billion dollars in 2013.

The Obama administration is deciding whether to continue pursuing charges that could send author James Risen to jail. In State of War, Risen used an anonymous source to describe a failed CIA operation in Iran. The Bush Administration demanded that Risen reveal his source, but the author has refused. According to the New York Times,

On KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt talks to Edmund White and his husband, Michael Carroll, about their recent books.

Sarah Polley will be writing and directing an adaptation of the YA book Looking for Alaska, by John Green.

The June/July issue of the Atlantic Monthly is out. In an article about the effect of autocorrect on punctuation, Joe Pinsker quotes a linguistics professor who points out that the devices that are usually blamed for corrupting conventions may, with the autocorrect function, ultimately be responsible for preserving them. Meanwhile, Sarah Boxer writes about the

The Spanish writer Ana María Matute has died. She was 88. Matute was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize. Her last novel, Family Demons, is due out in the fall.

John Cheever’s Westchester house is on the market. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom house, which was built in 1795, is for sale for $525,000.

The New York Times ends “The Lede” blog. Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Poynter that the paper has been “moving away from blogs in the past year.” In fact, “almost half” of the paper’s blogs will soon close or merge.

Twitter is trying out a new feature that will allow users

At the New Inquiry, an animated map tracks the shifting prominence of American cities in novels over the past two hundred years, drawing on Google Ngram data.“More than anything,” write the map’s creators, the data “shows the enduring dominance of New York City, towering over the cultural landscape in a way that the map, with its pseudo-logarithmic scale, can’t even do justice to.”

The Tumblr “Last Night’s Reading” offers drawings of writers doing readings in New York, along with quotations from the writer’s remarks. (Geoff Dyer: “You can’t do it without talent, but you can’t do it without

People taking office are swearing in using e-readers. “A Kindle is not a beautiful object,” Hannah Rosefield notes at the New Yorker. But this may be partly the point. “As cool as a copy of the Constitution from the eighteenth century would have been,” says Suzi LeVine, the American ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, “ I wanted to use a copy that is from the twenty-first century, and that reflects my passion for technology and my hope for the future.”

Also at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain reviews a new biography of Stephen Crane. “Existential compromises fascinated Crane. Does an

The New York Times and Elle profile Emily Gould, whose first novel, Friendship, comes out July 1.

A study examining the brain activity of experienced and novice writers showed differences in the two groups of subjects: the caudate nucleus, which figures in skills that come with practice, was active in experts; in novices it wasn’t. As Carl Zimmer explains at the Times, “the inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch” resembled those of “people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports”: “When we first start learning a skill — be it playing a piano

Twenty previously unknown poems by Pablo Neruda have been found among his papers. The poems were discovered in a box of manuscripts at the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Santiago, Chile; the earliest dates from the mid-1950s. At El Pais, read an excerpt in Spanish.

At the Paris Review Daily, the poet Rowen Ricardo Phillips is blogging the World Cup.

First editions of Haruki Murakami’s new novel will come with a sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators, the Guardian reports, shaking its head over the increasingly frantic publicity efforts of publishers.

Penguin Books published an