Nadeem Aslam Variety reports that the recent firing of four top Los Angeles Times editors “was the result of a month of newsroom turmoil.” Paul Pringle, an investigative reporter at the paper, had filed a human resources complaint about the delay of a story about USC, which Pringle alleged was “due to cozy relations between the editors and USC officials.” Although an investigation didn’t prove Pringle’s claims, the incident prompted “additional newsroom grievances against the paper’s leadership.” Nieman Lab reflects on former editor Davan Maharaj’s time at the paper, “a remarkable run as a tightrope walker on one of

Mark Bray The Village Voice will discontinue its weekly print edition. “The most powerful thing about the Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week,” owner Peter Barbey said in a statement. “It was that the Village Voice was alive, and that it changed in step with and reflected the times and the ever-evolving world around it. I want the Village Voice brand to represent that for a new generation of people—and for generations to come.” Publishing platform Medium has finally explained its new system for paying writers. The $5-per-month reader memberships

Pamela Paul Beyonce is working on a 600-page book about the making of Lemonade. How to Make Lemonade “shows the inspiration and themes behind some of the film’s most provocative and cryptic moments,” and includes a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson. The limited-edition version of the book includes two LPs, and is available on Beyonce’s website for $300. Adweek lists the online publishers who have chosen to “pivot to video” in the last few months. “Check in later to see what, exactly, they have headed toward.” Publisher’s Weekly visits the offices of the New York Times’s book review, which

Jhumpa Lahiri nothing about our days today is subtle, and the challenge of making science fiction not seem like a bald ripoff of current headlines is much more of a task than it’s been in a while.” In a letter to his unborn child, novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard dwells on what “makes life worth living.” A partial list: apples, plastic bags, loneliness, and pissing. At Playboy, novelist and critic Tom Carson weighs in on Tina Fey’s cake-eating SNL skit. “We’ll never know how anyone could watch her stuffing her face until her lips were covered in goo as she

Michael Chabon Novelist Michael Chabon has written “an open letter to our fellow Jews,” stating that, although some Jews have not opposed President Trump because he seems to be a friend to Israel, it is no longer acceptable, or even safe, to remain quiet. “Now he’s coming after you,” Chabon notes. “The question is: what are you going to do about it?” “On the floor by my bed there are heaps of books I want to read, books I have to read and books I believe I need to read. So we are talking about id, ego and superego

Saeed Jones and Isaac Fitzgerald Isaac Fitzgerald is leaving his post at Buzzfeed Books to start a new “morning show” with poet and Buzzfeed culture editor Saeed Jones. The show, called AM to DM, is part of Buzzfeed, and will be livestreamed through Twitter daily from 8-9am. It begins on September 25, and is, according to Fitzgerald, “a one-of-a-kind morning show … connecting an up-to-date audience with stories happening now, right from inside the news cycle.” Jonathan Chait—the author of Audacity, a book about the Obama administration—has written an article that shows how Trump’s aides have tried to conceal the

Michiko Kakutani At New York magazine, Boris Kachka reports on what led the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani to take a buyout last month, and the book that Kakutani is working on now. Sources say that Kakutani felt at odds with the new direction of the book review under Pamela Paul. “Lone wolves hurling thunderbolts from their garrets gave way to affable co-critics doing online chats . . . writing personal essays and exploring their own biases,” Kachka writes. “For a very long time, Michi got her way,” one anonymous source said, “until very recently people started pushing back

April Ryan GoDaddy is cancelling the Daily Stormer’s hosting service after the website posted a hate-filled article about Heather Heyer, who was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville last weekend. At Columbia Journalism Review, photographer Ryan Kelly recounts capturing the moment that James Alex Fields Jr rammed his car into a crowd of protesters. Kelly was covering the protest on his last day as a photojournalist for The Daily Progress. “It was a terrible thing and the fact that more people will be more aware of it happening is an overall positive,” he writes, “but I can’t say

The Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation has created a list of books and articles to help “educate readers about the Penguin Random House has given us a sneak peak of the cover of Melissa Broder’s novel The Pisces, due out from the Hogarth imprint in May 2018. In an interview at the Creative Independent, Matthew Zapruder—a poet, editor (he edits the poetry page of the NYT Magazine), and critic—confronts an assumption that he believes steers readers away from poetry: “People think poetry is hard and their idea about what’s hard about it is wrong. They think it’s hard because

Zinzi Clemmons. Photo: Nina Subin At the New York Times Magazine, Ruth Franklin profiles novelist Claire Messud. Although Messud’s works have been well-received by critics, they have not always been commercial successes. But Messud says that she has no interest in trying to make her work more attractive to a wider readership. ‘‘There are bell bottoms and miniskirts, and there are pencil skirts and stiletto heels,’’ she said. ‘‘You can write something that’s a perfect work of art, but if it’s a pencil skirt that falls in a miniskirt moment, God help you. You just have to make your

Molly Patterson. Photo: Elaine Sheng Bruce Springsteen will perform on Broadway this fall, in a show that incorporates his music, excerpts from his autobiography, and other pieces of his writing. “Springsteen on Broadway” will run for eight weeks at the Walter Kerr Theater. “My show is just me, the guitar, the piano and the words and music,” Springsteen said. “Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work.” Director Ava DuVernay is adapting Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn for television. Actress Busy Philipps is writing an autobiographical

Reggie Ugwu Vox analyzed seventeen months of Fox Friends transcripts in an effort to understand the relationship between the show and the president. Rather than simply echoing the party line as traditional state-run media might, Alvin Chang writes that the show seeks to offer Trump advice. “What we found is that Fox Friends has a symbiotic relationship with Trump that is far weirder and more interesting than state media,” Chang writes. “Instead of talking for Trump, they are talking to him.” The New York Times has hired Reggie Ugwu as a pop culture reporter. Ugwu was most recently at

Mary Beard The New York Times reports on the growing trend of investing in politically-minded memes, instead of spending money on traditional marketing tools like TV and newspaper ads. “Viral media expertise is emerging as a crucial skill for political operatives, and as donors look to replicate the success of the social media sloganeers who helped lift President Trump to victory, they’re seeking out talented meme makers.” WNYC has picked up former US Attorney Preet Bharara’s podcast. “Stay Tuned with Preet” will be a weekly show that focuses “on issues of justice and fairness.” The Globe and Mail profiles

Benjamin Moser More than a year ago, New York Review Classics announced that it would reissue Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 book Making It, with an introduction by critic and Susan Sontag biographer Benjamin Moser. When the new edition of Making It was published, however, it arrived with an introduction by Terry Teachout. Now, Moser explains why. Podhoretz is notorious for his shift from the radical left to the reactionary right, and in his introduction, Moser tried to show that even though he was interested in Making It, this did not amount to an endorsement of Podhoretz’s current political positions. “Podhoretz

Margot Lee Sheerly. photo: Aran Shetterly Literary Hub talks to Jenny Zhang about childhood, representing the immigrant experience in fiction, and her new book, Sour Heart. While Zhang was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, her classmates often said that the language of her stories’ Chinese-American subjects wasn’t believable to them. “I always found that so befuddling,” she said. “How am I, a Chinese person, less knowledgeable about how Chinese people talk than you, a non-Chinese person? Then I realize what they’re really saying is ‘I’ve never met a Chinese person who speaks this way’ and there’s a

Editor and author Judith Jones died yesterday at 93. The New York Times writes that Jones—who pulled the manuscript for the diary of Anne Frank out of a reject pile and published Mastering the Art of French Cooking after it had been passed over by other publishers—“modestly ascribed her success to being in the right place at the right time.” Flatiron has bought former FBI director James Comey’s book, but instead of “the tell-all memoir many readers hoped for,” Entertainment Weekly writes that the book will be about leadership. The Wall Street Journalreports that the book sold for $2.5

Sam Shepard. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe Patti Smith remembers friend and collaborator Sam Shepard, who died last week from complications of ALS. “He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west,” she writes. “He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.” At New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen reflects on the current demand for dystopian fiction. From Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, to Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, Lorentzen explains how “the present moment, with its dismal

Gwendolyn Brooks Mic examines MSNBC’s thwarted evolution into a centrist news channel. Chairman Andrew Lack had been planning to reorganize the network and increase its ratings by cancelling opinion-based programming in favor of more balanced news coverage. “But the election of Donald Trump has complicated that evolution,” Kelsey Sutton writes, “raising the profile and popularity of MSNBC’s liberal hosts just as Lack sought to dial back the network’s liberal identity.” Although the White House claims that Anthony Scaramucci’s departure was meant to give the new chief of staff a “clean slate,” that may be an impossible task for the

Choire Sicha Choire Sicha—the onetime Gawker writer, cofounder and former editor of the Awl, and the author of Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. 2009 A.D.) in a Large City—has been named the new editor of the New York Times’s Style section. Alexandra Schwartz considers the career and legacy of Times book critic Michiko Kakutani: “A good review brought on elation,” Schwartz writes. “A bad one incited rage, sometimes despair. Nicholson Baker compared getting a negative Kakutani review to undergoing surgery without anesthesia; Jonathan Franzen called her ‘the stupidest person in New York.’ (She had

Parul Sehgal. Photo: David Surowiecki After nearly forty years with the paper, the New York Times’s chief book critic Michiko Kakutani is stepping down. The Times has a round up of the best of Kakutani’s thirty-year years of reviewing. Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo reports that Kakutani accepted a buyout offer, and plans to “branch out and write more essays about culture and politics in Trump’s America.” Known for launching the career of writers like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, “Kakutani’s departure will instantly change the shape of the publishing world,” Pompeo writes. “She wielded the paper’s power with