Michael Kinsley is leaving his position as editor at large of The New Republic to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, for which he will write a monthly column. He plans write about “what I’ve written about most of the time: politics, in one form or another.”

Walter Isaacson, author of the bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, is putting together a new encyclopedia of innovators. For some entries, he is trying out some unorthodox methods: He’s crowdsourcing the edits.

The Paris Review has reprinted filmmaker David Cronenberg’s introduction to Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of Kafka’s

A federal court in San Francisco ruled on Friday that bloggers are entitled to the same free speech protections as a traditional journalists. “As the Supreme Court has accurately warned, a First Amendment distinction between the institutional press and other speakers is unworkable,” wrote Andrew Hurwitz, one of the three judges in a federal appeals court panel, which ruled that Crystal Cox, a blogger who lost a defamation case three years ago after writing a post accusing a financial services firm of tax fraud, deserved a new trial and could only be found liable for defamation if she had acted

St. Martin’s Press has agreed to pay an eight-figure advance for romance writer Sylvia Day’s next two books.

The “largest free literary festival on earth” gets underway today in Jaipur, one of more than sixty such events taking place every year across India. According to the Wall Street Journal, the 2014 edition is a masala chai latte (substantive, spicy) compared to 2013, which was mostly a cappuccino (frothy). Here’s the New York Times’s guide to the highlights of the five-day festival, which is now in its ninth year.

Flavorwire’s new list of “25 Women Poised to Lead the Culture in 2014”

Judy Blume and Lena Dunham trade notes on reading for a new, pocket-sized volume published by The Believer.

If you’ve already faltered on your New Year’s resolutions, Brendan Mathews suggests reading Chekhov for a better 2014, albeit with a few caveats: “Before embarking on a self-help tour of late-Czarist Russia, be advised that Chekhov doesn’t provide easy answers to becoming a kinder, more caring person,” he writes, in an essay for the Millions. “There’s no five-step solution, no short prayer that will increase your fortunes and lay waste to the fields of your enemies…. Chekhov doesn’t make

At the LA Times, Sara Marcus reviews Masha Gessen’s new book, Words Will Break Cement, about the musicians, activist, and feminists who make up the Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot: “Gessen is not just asking how these women came to form Pussy Riot, or how they came to be punished so severely for making protest art. She’s also asking what makes great political art, and proposing that art and truth-telling have the power to defeat oppressive regimes.”

The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, has added another major acquisition to its horde of literary treasures. In addition to the papers of

Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, has won the first-ever John Leonard Prize, the National Book Critics Circle announced yesterday. Marra’s novel, set in war-torn Chechnya, was singled out for the new award, created this year to honor a debut work in any genre. The organization also named thirty finalists in six additional categories, from criticism to fiction. Among the contenders are Alexander Hemon, Rebecca Solnit, Jesmyn Ward, Hilton Als, Jonathan Franzen, Janet Malcolm, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Javier Marías, Donna Tartt, George Packer, and Lawrence Wright. The

The Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes, the Palestinian writer Suad Amiry, the Italian psychiatrist Guiseppe dell’Acqua, and the French philosophy Michel Serres are the winners of Italy’s thirty-ninth annual Nonino Prizes. V. S. Naipaul presided over this year’s jury, which included Peter Brook, John Banville, and the Syrian poet Adonis, among others.

Roger Ailes once said to his client, Senator Al D’Amato: “Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?" The New Republic highlights Roger Ailes’s most outrageous comments from Off Camera, the

The provocative, award-winning poet, playwright, and political activist Amiri Baraka has died. Born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934, he grew up in New Jersey and later became the state’s second poet laureate. In his long and eventful life, he was associated with the Beats and the Black Arts Movement, though he eventually broke with them both. He wrote beautifully about the blues and jazz and caused considerable controversy with his poem about 9/11, titled “Somebody Blew Up America.” He was 79 and had recently been suffering from an unknown illness.

Is crowd-testing fiction on the agenda for big

The New York Times’s redesign, unveiled yesterday, has lots of white space, minimal clutter, and embedded multimedia and comments. The Times also now features sponsored articles (“advertorials”), which are conspicuously marked (the public editor has posted info about how these “native ads” work). Behind the scenes, the new site has an advanced analytics system, which will track and tag data about readers, and Times’s web designers are said to be monitoring users’ reaction to the site and making adjustments.

A new book of love letters by Christopher Isherwood and his boyfriend Dan Bachardy is

When a reader wrote to Amelia Gray to complain that nothing happened in her novel Threats, she wrote back with spy-worthy instructions, a story, and a check.

The category winners of the Costa Book Awards have been announced, and the winners include Kate Atkinson (for Life After Life), Nathan Filer (for The Shock of the Fall), and Lucy Hughes-Hallet (for her biography of Gabriele D'Annunizo). All of these authors are now in the running for the grand prize, which will be announced on January 28.

“The things that the tech boom’s golden boys said last year,” writes Rebecca Solnit in response to

As a boy, Jorge Luis Borges carried a small dagger, a gift from his father, who told him to use it against his bullies to prove he was a man. For years thereafter, writes Michael Greeenberg in the New York Review of Books, Borges “prowled the obscure barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he wished to know and absorb.”

Can anyone step up to compete with Amazon? Two contenders have just consolidated, as Zola, an independent website, buys Bookish, an online portal formed by Penguin, Simon &

Morrissey is at work on a novel and a new album (in that order). In a recent interview, Moz says he’s lost faith in pop music and wants to write instead, claiming that his memoir, Autobiography, “was more successful than any record I’ve ever released.”

Researchers at Emory University have discovered that reading novels exercises the brain. "We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else's shoes in a figurative sense,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns. “Now we're seeing that something may also be happening biologically."

At the Times, OR books publisher Colin Robinson weighs