John Cook is leaving his post as editor of chief of Gawker to head The Intercept, a digital magazine founded by eBay guru Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar’s First Look Media company has scooped up a number of high-profile journalists lately, including Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras.

The New York Times is launching a new blog, The Upshot, to replace Nate Silver’s popular Times site of stats-based political reporting. The Upshot will have about 15 journalists, with an aim of, “Trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational way

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog will relaunch next week under the ESPN umbrella. Silver, a statistician known for his election predictions and great fantasy baseball cheat-sheets, recently left the New York Times after his three-year contract expired.

In a Guardian profile, Mary-Kay Wimers, the editor of the London Review of Books, talks about the magazine’s growing influence (and its most controversial pieces), the importance of artful long-form essays, and the lack of female bylines at her publication.

Teju Cole on his “guilty” reading pleasures: “No guilt. I read many kinds of things,

Last week, the Times revealed that the author behind the anonymous Twitter account GSElevator, which purported to print conversations overheard on the elevator at Goldman Sachs, was one John LeFevre, who has never worked at Goldman Sachs and currently lives in Texas. Many wondered what would become of the author’s forthcoming book Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, which was recently purchased by Simon & Schuster for a six-figure sum. Wonder no more: Simon & Schuster has dropped the book. And what about the advance? In an email to Publishers

The n+1 editors weigh in on Ukraine, Putin, and the West: “There’s a reason Ukraine is at the heart of the most significant geopolitical crisis yet to appear in the post-Soviet space. There is no post-Soviet state like it.” Fifteen years ago, John le Carre revealed that his recurring character George Smiley was based on John Bingham, who, like leCarre, was a real-life spy who worked for Britain’s intelligence agency MI5 and later went on to become a writer. A critic recently claimed that “Bingham detested Mr. le Carre’s opinions of the espionage game.” In a letter to the Telegraph, le Carre

The Awl has hired two editors—John Herrman, who currently works at Buzzfeed, and Matt Buchanan, who currently works at the New Yorker—to run the site. “We'll introduce them in more detail down the road, but they're really lovely, thoughtful, curious and smart—and also they're total weirdos.”

Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, has been hired as a columnist by the Washington Times.

Listen to Jennifer Egan read Mary Gaitskill's story "The Other Place" in this month's New Yorker fiction podcast. Brian Eno has put together a reading list of his "20 Essential Books for sustaining

On Friday, one Mark Ames posted a story on PandoDaily in which he investigated Pierre Omidyar’s contributions to Ukraine revolutionary groups. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, is bankrolling the much-talked-about First Look Media. What does this say about First Look? Not much, says Glenn Greenwald, one of First Look’s top editors. Greenwald responded that the activities of the Omidyar Network “have no effect whatsoever on my journalism or the journalism of The Intercept. That’s because we are guaranteed full editorial freedom and journalistic independence.”

The New Yorker takes a look at a 1979

David Remnick has posted an article about the upheaval in the Ukraine, and about Putin’s invasion of Crimea, at the New Yorker’s website. “Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse.”

Yesterday, the Sports section of the New York Times ran an excerpt of sportswriter Juliet Macur’s new book Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, which will be released this week. The excerpt states that by 1993, Armstrong was preparing for his races by using “the blood booster EPO, human growth hormone, blood thinners,

In light of the controversy about The Observer’s recent piece about New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman (considered a Trump-ordered takedown by many), Jack Shafer writes: “If an editor can’t commission a hatchet job, or at the very least encourage a reporter to take a preferred direction, what’s the point of being an editor? Excessive fairness provides only one path to truth, and one man’s smear is often another man’s exuberant truth-telling.” Meanwhile, Gawker has uncovered emails showing just how the story developed, concluding that it was motivated, at least in part, by Schneiderman’s

The New Republic’s literary editor Leon Wieseltier is no fan of New Republic senior editor John Judis’s book Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Wieseltier praised a negative review of Judis’s book, calling it “tendentious, imprecise, and sometimes risibly inaccurate” (among other things).

A movie of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn starring and directed by Edward Norton will begin filming in New York later this year.

March Madness for bookworms begins next week, with the Morning News Tournament of Books. The brackets will be judged by novelist

Late last month, the Goldman Sachs employee behind the Twitter account GS Gossip—which publishes comments overheard in the firm’s elevator—sold his insider’s account of Wall Street culture to Simon & Schuster for six figures. The book, tentatively titled Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, is scheduled to be released in October 2014. But there might be a problem. At the Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that the author, John Lefevre, “doesn’t work at the firm. And he never did.”

The Observer defends its recent piece about New York State

The VIDA count for 2013 has been released.

Carl Van Vechten was a New York socialite, a “best-selling writer of scandalous novels,” connoisseur of American literature, and a champion of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes. He was also a photographer, and shot portraits of thousands of cultural figures. At the FSG blog, Edward White, the author of The Tastemaker, posts and writes detailed captions for fifteen Van Vechten photographs—of Harry Belafonte, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, W.E.B. DuBois, and others.

At Bookslut, the shortlist for the Daphne

Writer Alexander Chee recently said that he found trains to be great places to write. “I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers,” Chee remarked. Amtrak is now granting his wish. Amtrak has plans to offer some writers free round-trip tickets. In fact, the program has already started: Jessica Gross has taken the “test run” residency.

When New York magazine announced that it would become a biweekly last December, a press release promised a more “ambitious” print publication. At the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner takes a look at the first issue of the new New York, and finds it more or less the