“Net neutrality” describes a state of affairs in which the companies providing internet act like utilities, delivering service without favoring or blocking particular content. In the name of preserving this ideal, the FCC has recently unveiled a proposal that will in fact degrade it, according to many, in part by allowing internet service providers such as Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T to create what amount to fast and slow lanes. At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal and Adrienne LaFrance offer a primer on the new proposal, and the Columbia Journalism Review suggests five ideas for reinventing internet

Dustin Rowles writes about Salon’s decision to rewrite the headline of his recent and well-read think piece about “how we treat violent and sexual crimes differently.” As he points out, the new headline clashes with the actual intentions of the article. “Now, when I saw that headline, I didn’t even realize it was my piece at first, and I was pissed before I’d even read it.”

The University of Chicago Press is hoping that Alice Goffman’s On the Run, a work of sociology that follows a small group of young black men in a Philadelphia neighborhood for six years, will reach more than an academic

At Salon, Laura Miller interviews the literary theorist Franco Moretti, whose methods are largely quantitative and whose work avoids focusing on a few universally approved texts. “I’m interested in understanding the culture at large, rather than just its best results,” he explains. “I have no doubt that canonical books are best—although we can spend days arguing what ‘best’ means. But it’s not enough for me to understand that. I want to understand the broader conventions, the field of attempts and failures, hoping that that may tell us something significant about the culture we live in or that

Writing that draws on lived experience and real people never merely reflects, argues Leslie Jamison in the New York Times Bookends column: It distorts, inverts, reinvents; it offers “a set of parallel destinies.” The “peril” of using real people is two-fold: ”what it will do to your work, and what it will do to your life.”

Pavel Durov, the founder of Russia’s most popular social networking site, VKontakte, has been fired from his position as CEO. Durov claims that VKontakte is now under the “complete control” of two close allies of Putin. Russia “is incompatible with Internet business at the

Gillian Flynn took to Reddit on Tuesday for an AMA ("Ask Me Anything"), reassuring fans that the Gone Girl screenplay will not stray too far from the novel. Flavorwire compiled a list of things they learned from the Q&A, including Flynn's reading list, the process behind the "cool girl" speech, and why she is okay with unlikeable characters: "I think you can forgive a lot if a person makes you laugh (even if you know you shouldn’t be laughing).”

Speaking of adaptations, relatives of David Foster Wallace say they do not endorse the upcoming movie The End of the Tour, which is based on David

Publishers Weekly looks ahead to the best books of the summer, including John Waters’s hitchhiking memoir; an updated Philip Marlowe novel from John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black); another Bolaño; and NYRB classics from Jean-Patrick Manchette and Alberto Moravia.

Elon Green talks to Adam Begley, whose biography of John Updike was just published, about writing the book’s vivid deathbed scene.

An interview with Leslie Jamison, author of the The Empathy Exams: “I think shame is a powerful signal—like a fever—of some internal struggle. I mean, shame comes attached to many things—often

At the New Republic Paul Berman remembers Gabriel García Márquez, celebrating the “lordly grandeur” of the Nobel-winning author’s work.

The Paris Review has posted a conversation with Austin fiction writer Bill Cotter about his new novel, The Parallel Apartments, and the brutish and short violence it contains: “I wanted to prod the reader through an impossible, unlivable universe that he might be glad to escape at the end of the book—but the nature of violence, in real life, is always fast and furious. If it wasn’t, we could simply dodge it.”

Christopher Sorrentino—author of the Patty

Gabriel Garcia Marquez died yesterday at the age of 87. He won the Nobel Prize in 1982, and his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is a cornerstone of magical-realist fiction. His philosophy might be boiled down to a statement he once made to the Paris Review: “A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

Disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer has launched a new blog, and Malcolm Gladwell recommends that you read it.

Colm Toibin has been chosen to serve as the chairman of the PEN World Voices Festival, starting in 2015.

At the New Yorker, Gary Shteyngart satirizes

Jim Romenesko reports that investigative reporter Chris Hamby has left CPI to work for Buzzfeed—only two days after winning a Pulitzer prize. “I’m thrilled to be joining a powerhouse team that will combine the time-honored rigors of investigative journalism with the creativity, technological prowess and reach of BuzzFeed,” Hamby says. In related news, ABC has accused CPI of downplaying the network’s contributions to Hamby’s yearlong report, which exposed how doctors, lawyers, and coal-industry executives worked together to deny medical benefits to miners suffering from black lung. CPI has

Google is looking to expand its headquarters. They want a building big enough to hold 3,000 of its employees—which apparently means something “half the size of the Chrysler Building.”

On Sunday Stephen King tweeted the end of a Game of Thrones episode and sparked the outrage of his 370,000 Twitter followers. King has been happily spoiling numerous shows since he joined Twitter a few months ago, and was unmoved by the uproar. “Romeo and Juliet die in Act 5,” he tweeted a few minutes later.

FSG has changed the covers of their paperback versions of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume epic, My

The Guardian US and the Washington Post both collected Public Service Pulitzers for stories related to Edward Snowden’s leaks. Snowden has publicly declared the award a "vindication" of his actions and the larger inquiry into “domestic surveillance practices”; the Prize board, meanwhile, nervously insists that their granting of the award is about recognizing good journalism and shouldn’t be understood as an endorsement of Snowden. The fiction award went to Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch.

Dave Eggers has a new novel coming out in June, a mere eight months after his last, The Circle, which was published

David Mitchell has a new novel, The Bone Clocks, coming out this September, and has reportedly signed a three-book deal with Random House. The new novel is another decade-spanning, genre-hopping epic, clocking in at about 700 pages.

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s riveting New York Times Magazine essay on two mysterious prewar blues singers artfully integrates audio, video, and pictures—a rare example of the Web’s bells and whistles actually working to draw out the complexities of a literary story.

This weekend, the LA Times announced the winners of its Book Prize.

The New York Times profiles the