The New York Times announced yesterday that its executive editor, Jill Abramson, is leaving. She will be replaced by her managing editor, Dean Baquet. The publisher didn’t go into detail about the reasons for the change, saying that it was “an issue of newsroom management," but Ken Auletta reports at the New Yorker's blog that there's rumor that it may have had to do with Abramson's dissatisfaction over her pay and pension benefits, which were significantly lower than that of her predecessor, Bill Keller. Abramson, who was the first female executive editor of the paper, has been

Now that plans to renovate the New York Public Library have been canceled, its fate is unclear. Most of the research collection has been moved off-site. “Are empty stacks going to be the permanent and visible sign of the library’s recent misadventure?” wonders Caleb Crain at the New Yorker. “A few years ago, the library spent fifty million dollars restoring its façade. It’s painful to think that the money can’t be found to repair its heart.”

Forbes lampoons Vox—the newish website whose mandate is to condense and distill complex news—by explaining the website in its own style. Matt Saccaro of

It’s now possible to avoid people on Twitter without actually un-following them: Witness the “mute” function, ye conflict-averse, and rejoice.

Of sixty-six obituaries recently published in the Times, only seven of them were for women, according to an unofficial count done by the poet Lynne Melnick.

James Wood celebrates Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel, a book “unashamed by many varieties of knowledge” that “takes for granted a capacity for both abstract and worldly thinking.” As Wood observes, “it wears its knowledge heavily, as a burden, a crisis, an injury,” asking “who gets to be called

Salon reports that Amazon has been delaying shipments of books published by Hachette, claiming that readily available bestsellers by authors such as Stephen Colbert and Malcolm Gladwell will take two to three weeks to ship. As the Times explains: “Among Amazon’s tactics against Hachette, some of which it has been employing for months, are charging more for its books and suggesting that readers might enjoy instead a book from another author.” Amazon has yet to explain the slowdown, but most agree that the online megastore is attempting to assert their power and weaken publishers: “The company

Sarah Nicole Prickett interviews Nona Willis Aronowitz about her mother, Ellen Willis, and a new anthology of her mother's writing, The Essential Ellen Willis. A music critic at the New Yorker and later a cultural critic at the Village Voice, Willis died in 2006, but a new generation of writers—including Sara Marcus, Sasha Frere Jones, Cord Jefferson, and Prickett—is championing her work.

Politico reports that the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, is planning to launch a news service geared toward a conservative audience.

The poet Russell Edson has died.

In Bookforum, Dave Hickey,

In response to public outcry, the New York Public Library has abandoned its plans to redo the 42nd Street building. The renovation, which would have eliminated the book stacks under the main reading room and sent them to an off-site location, had a price tag of $150 million, and many critics. No fewer than four lawsuits had been filed against it.

The Daily Mail has apologized to J.K. Rowling and paid her “substantial damages” for an article that she claimed mischaracterized a piece she wrote.

With the American Scholar’s “Next Line, Please” project, the public is invited to build a sonnet line

Rivka Galchen will be appearing tonight at 192 Books in celebration of her new story collection, American Innovations (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Reviewing the book for us, Chloé Cooper Jones calls Galchen’s approach to life and death “an epistemological one.”

The Poetry Foundation has awarded this year’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize to Nathaniel Mackey, and have posted an interview with Mackey, and a podcast of him reading and talking about his work. The Foundation also announced their award for poetry criticism to the University of California Press for their recent Robert Duncan books, with John

Salon mourns the closure of the oldest LGBT bookstore in the country, Philadelphia’s Giovanni’s Room.

Tim Parks asks why the people who attend book events pose such stupid questions. “The irony perhaps is that what’s mysterious to them is even more mysterious to you.”

George Prochnik will speak tonight at the New York Public Library about Austrian novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig, who in the 1920s and '30s was the bestselling author in the world. Prochnik’s new book, The Impossible Exile (Other Press), is a study of Zweig’s final years in the US and Brazil, where he lived after fleeing

The novel is dead (again). It will still be “be written and read,” Will Self argues in the the Guardian, “but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.”

Shares of Twitter ended on Friday at $39.01, and could drop toward $30. But it’s still over-priced, Reuters points out.

An interview with Hassan Blasim, author of The Corpse Exhibition, a collection of stories about Iraq. “I still write in literary Arabic but I try

Buzzfeed took down a post after Maria Popova complained that the site had reposted images that Popova had herself scanned for one of her own articles, about a rare 1995 edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. According to Popova, Buzzfeed had represented the images out of context, leading her to call the site “the vermin on of the internet–or, for a more context-appropriate metaphor, the pigs of the internet.”

The musician and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein has been cast to perform with Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel

The 2013 Believer Book Award goes to Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories. Karen Green’s Bough Down wins for poetry.

The Academy of American Poets has a new website, which highlights their refurbished Poem-A-Day feature and has the nice option of isolating the poem on the page, uncrowded by boxes or menus or sidebars. Yesterday’s poem was Catie Rosemurgy’s “Star in the Throat, Fire in the Cupboard.”

The PEN World Voices festival opened on Monday in New York with a lineup of short, politically focused talks by Noam Chomsky, the Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado, the Syrian poet Adonis,

A survey of 2,234 adults, published yesterday, finds that not much has changed since the poll was last conducted in 2008: apparently our favorite book is still the Bible and we still like Gone with the Wind second-best. There's some good news: Atlas Shrugged has disappeared from the top ten.

Alex Pareene, formerly of Gawker and Salon, joinsFirst Look’s still-unnamed second vertical as executive editor. Pareene will oversee political content for the new magazine, which will focus on politics and finance.

Heidegger’s recently published notebooks reveal an anti-Semitism more deeply seated than