On her new track “Flawless,” Beyoncé samples Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author, most recently, of Americanah. The sample, taken from Adichie’s Ted talk, states: “We should all be feminists,” and makes up most of the song’s second verse.

As the deluge of end-of-year best-of lists continues, it becomes easy to wonder if we should care about any of them. At the New Yorker, Elif Batuman helpfully explains, in convenient list form, that we should.

Hate-reading our way through 2013: Obamacare is Obama’s Katrina, Iraq; Hipsturbia; Mr. 300 Sandwiches; etc.

Gallerist reports on a

The New York Observer is ditching its iconic salmon tint and moving to plain white paper. If New York magazine’s decision to bail on its weekly publishing schedule isn't enough to jolt the print-media landscape, come February, the Observer will lose its classic pink look as part of a larger effort, according to Capital New York, to transform the weekly newspaper’s format and give it a major image overhaul.

After reporting a story for three years and delaying its publication three times (at the request of the US government), the Associated Press finally breaks the news: Robert Levinson, an

Thirteen news organizations, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press, have written a letter asking all parties to the conflict in Syria to stop kidnapping journalists on the job. More than thirty journalists have been abducted in 2013, seven in the past two months alone.

Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, Jonathan Ames, Sheila Heti, and Lawrence Weschler will appear for an evening of reading and discussion celebrating The Best of McSweeney’s, an anthology covering the influential lit mag’s first fifteen years.

MoMA is reissuing Calvin Tomkins’s

More than 500 authors (including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan) have signed a petition for the UN demanding an end to government and corporate surveillance of individuals online.

n+1 just published No Regrets: Three Discussions, a collection of conversations about the perils and joys of reading while female, featuring Elif Batuman, Astra Taylor, Emily Witt, Sara Marcus, and many more. Editor Dayna Tortorici writes, “I knew that women speak to one another differently in rooms without men. Not better, not more honestly, not more or less intelligently—just differently,

Vladimir Putin has unexpectedly closed RIA Novosti, a state news agency. According to agency insiders, the move “appear[s] to point toward a tightening of state control in the already heavily regulated media sector.”

Claire Messud takes an interviewer to task for dwelling on the unlikable qualities of her latest protagonist. Harper Lee sues a museum in Alabama for trying to cash in on her legacy. Lauren Sandler tells women writers that if they want to be successful, they should stick to having just one child. At the New Yorker, Rachel Arons reviews the year in literary feuds. But on the whole,

This year, the traditional Nobel Lecture in Literature has been replaced with a video of the 2013 prizewinner, Alice Munro, talking about her work. “Alice Munro: In Her Own Words” was shown at the Swedish Academy on Saturday, and is now available online.

On Sunday, New Yorker editor David Remnick told a conference on digital media that he didn’t think New York magazine’s recent move to a bi-weekly was a good sign for the magazine. He was also politely skeptical about New York editor Adam Moss’s comment that he was “pretty excited” about the online opportunities that New York’s print cutback

At the New Yorker, South African novelist and Nobel–winner Nadine Gordimer remembers Nelson Mandela: “Not a figure carved in stone but a tall man, of flesh and blood, whose suffering had made him not vengeful but still more human.”

The New York Times reports on a recent trip President Obama took to Politics and Prose bookstore in DC, where he bought nearly two dozen books. The Times reporter writes that the titles offer “a rare window into the president’s mind,” and notes, “unlike many of his predecessors, who devoured American history and biographies, Mr. Obama’s tastes lean toward the

According to Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, the British newspaper has met with US and English government agencies more than one hundred times since it obtained (and started publishing) documents on surveillance from NSA contractor Edward Snowden. National security, he suggests, has come to threaten freedom of the press.

The online auction organized to help raise money for St. Marks Bookshop is now underway, and will run through December 15. Among the books for sale are The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (signed and “lightly annotated”), Anne Carson’s Antignoick (with a cover

Eight cultural figures from the Dominican Republic have written an open letter condemning Junot Diaz, who is currently visiting the country to participate in talks about immigration, writing, and what it means to be a Dominican. The letter attacks the Pulitzer-winning Diaz for, among other things, “a scarce capacity for reflection and a disrespectful and mediocre use of the written word.”

At MobyLives, Dennis Johnson explains why Andre Schiffrin would have hated his Times obituary, and offers some context and further details about the great editor and publisher’s life.

Romenesko reports that

Beginning in March, New York magazine is going to come out every other week, becoming the latest publication to give up on weekly publication. As the Times points out, “The punishing economics of being a stand-alone weekly can be explained in one word: Newsweek.” Muckrack has a roundup of media responses. At the Awl, Choire Sicha argues that the magazine is still making money—some 3 million dollars a week, by his estimate.

In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates weighs in on Mike Tyson’s eager-to-please new autobiography: “To the extent that Tyson has a predominant tone in Undisputed

Longtime New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan died on Friday at the age of 59. In a New Republic profile from last fall, Nathan Heller said of Kaplan, “Much of New York’s journalism world has come to regard Kaplan as a distant but endearing uncle—quirky, steeped in lore, and something of a daemon of the trade.” Longform has a nice selection of articles by and about Kaplan, including an oral history of the Kaplan era of the Observer, written when Kaplan left the paper in 2009.

As the sale of the Bay Psalms book for $14.2 million last week reveals, the rare-book business is a lucrative one. So

Laurie Penny explains what’s wrong about the Bad Sex Award, the annual British award granted to the worst erotic fiction: Not only is the award dated, it’s also priggish.

At the TLS, John Ashbery, Michael Dirda, Marjorie Perloff, and others pick their favorite books of the year.

We’ve been enjoying the recent reports and photographs from Jynne Dilling Martin, a poet, a publicist, and currently the 2013 Artist in Residence in Antarctica.

Bookriot has compiled a list of the worst fictional families to spend Thanksgiving with. We were somewhat surprised not to find the Pollits, from Christina