Melissa Harris-Perry Buzzfeed reports that the New York Times has off-the-record tape of Donald Trump, who hopes to consolidate his lead in the race for the GOP nomination today, suggesting that his views on immigration may be less rigid than those he has expressed in public. Rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are asking that the recording be released. And election season seems the worst time for cable news to be losing Melissa Harris-Perry, whose MSNBC show has mysteriously collapsed, or in her words, been “effectively and utterly silenced.” If you haven’t yet read Joshua Cohen’s piece on Bernie Sanders, Super Tuesday may

Seamus Heaney Donald Trump, who feels that he has been mistreated by the media, says that if he becomes president, he will weaken First Amendment protections so that it will be easier to sue journalists for libel. Douglas Wolk has announced that he’s working on a book about having read 25,000 superhero comics, which will be edited by Ed Park and published by Penguin Press. This week at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, author Alexander Chee will discuss Max Ophuls’s lavish 1953 movie The Earrings of Madame de… and sign copies of his new novel, The Queen of the

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has announced that he has sold the New Republic to Win McCormack, the publisher and EIC of the literary magazine Tin House. McCormack has named Hamilton Fish, the publisher of the Washington Spectator (and the former publisher of The Nation), to be TNR’s new publisher and editorial director.

Gloria Steinem Land’s End has issued an apology for including excerpts from an interview with Gloria Steinem in its spring catalogue. “We understand that some of our customers were offended by the inclusion of an interview in a recent catalog with Gloria Steinem on her quest for women’s equality. We thought it was a good idea and we heard from our customers that, for different reasons, it wasn’t. For that, we sincerely apologize.” As Jezebel points out, the apology was issued shortly after anti-abortion activists flooded the Land’s End Facebook page with angry comments. Time magazine’s list of the women

Tony Tulathimutte The new miniseries about the O. J. Simpson trial has provided an opportunity to look back at some of the bestsellers that emerged following the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Vulture revisits the lowest of the lowlights in Faye Resnick’s Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted, while prosecutor Marcia Clark (herself now a novelist) says Jeffrey Toobin’s American Crime Story, on which the TV series is based, “has glaring inaccuracies.” According to Clark: “Toobin got a lot wrong because he’s not behind the scenes. He’s not there. And so he has

Amanda Hess The New York Times has awarded its David Carr fellowship to three writers. John Herrman of the Awl, Amanda Hess of Slate, and Greg Howard of Deadspin will be joining the Times for a two-year stint in the newsroom. Executive editor Dean Baquet explained why the award went to three applicants rather than just one: “We found these three candidates so compelling that we decided to select all of them. They are thoughtful, deep reporters. We will learn as much from them as they will from us.” John Herrman’s coeditor at the Awl, Matt Buchanan, is also moving on

Magaret Sullivan Umberto Eco’s final book, Pape Satàn Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society, will be published this weekend in Italy. The book was originally slated to come out in May, but the date was changed after Eco passed away this past Friday. Pape Satàn Aleppe is a collection of Eco’s essays for the magazine L’Espresso dating back to 2000. At The Guardian, Elisabetta Sgarbi, Eco’s Italian publisher, calls the new volume “an ironic book, as withering as he was.” There is no word yet about when the book will be released in English. In the wake of Jeb

Punctuation in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (left) and in Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (right) At the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin, whose most recent book is the Supreme Court study The Nine, looks back at the career of Antonin Scalia. Toobin points out that Scalia—unlike “the great Justices of the Supreme Court,” who “have always looked forward”—always “looked backward.” The author has some advice for Obama as he considers who might fill the empty seat: “Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a

Harper Lee, author of the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird, has died. The Times obituary revisits, among other things, her life in the south, her friendship with Truman Capote, the the controversy surrounding her second novel, Go Tell a Watchman.

Umberto Eco Umberto Eco has died at the age of 84. The author, best known for his 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, once described his library to the Paris Review, revealing the habit of mind that made him a genius: “I own a total of about fifty thousand books. But as a rare books collector I am fascinated by the human propensity for deviating thought. So I collect books about subjects in which I don’t believe, like kabbalah, alchemy, magic, invented languages. Books that lie, albeit unwittingly. I have Ptolemy, not Galileo, because Galileo told the truth. I prefer lunatic science.” Eco

Jill Soloway Transparent creator Jill Soloway is adapting Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick for television. Amazon has ordered a pilot episode of the show, which is being billed as a comedy, but if the industry press is any guide, Hollywood’s idea of what the book actually is remains fuzzy (“sex-comedy,” “pyscho-sexual novel,” “Rashomon-style”). We’re intrigued to see how the Emmy Award–winning Soloway handles the source material, which is mainly made up of letters (and faxes!) between the protagonist, her husband, and the all-powerful character “Dick,” or, as Deadline Hollywood describes him, the “off-putting but charismatic professor.” Facebook has

Álvaro Enrigue Choire Sicha, who is on hiatus from his site, The Awl, has taken a job with Vox media as the director of partner platforms. Meanwhile, one of those platforms is getting significantly smaller: Yahoo is killing off seven of its “content verticals” (i.e. digital magazines), leaving just four remaining. Visitors to the site will still find “news,” “sports,” “finance,” and “lifestyle,” but subjects like “parenting” and “health” have failed to make the cut. Apple is refusing to create a key for the FBI to unlock iPhones. This may be a principled decision, but it’s also a marketing move.  The

Dana Spiotta, photo by Jessica Marx The New York Times magazine has a profile of the novelist Dana Spiotta, whose new book Innocents and Others, is out next month. At one point, Spiotta recalls some early advice she got from Gordon Lish, which she does appear to have taken on board in her work: ‘‘Whatever you’re trying to hide is what you need to write from. . . . Whatever you’re trying to hide is what makes you an interesting writer.’’ As the South Carolina primary approaches, it’s well worth reading Christian Lorentzen’s report from New Hampshire, if you

Louise Mensch The New Yorker’s vast tome on the inner workings of the website TMZ is worth reading, if only for its portrait of a celebrity-gossip rag as a last bastion of old-school investigative reporting: Nicholas Schmidle writes that founder Harvey Levin “has trained many employees in the art of court reporting. Ben Presnell, who worked at ‘Celebrity Justice’ and, later, at TMZ, told me he spent most of his days at the Los Angeles County Municipal Courthouse, searching for new filings and trying to charm clerks into giving him information. Currently, TMZ has three reporters stationed full-time at

Ada Calhoun Justice Antonin Scalia’s death inspired quick, informative, and eloquent responses from Supreme Court scholar Ian Millhiser (austhor of Injustices), who looks at how Scalia’s absence could affect the Court’s docket; Jonathan Chait, who argues that Scalia’s death will change “everything”; and Dave Holmes, who writes, in response to Scalia’s aggressively antigay stances: “It is a curious feeling when a man who devoted a significant chunk of his career to your oppression dies.” Some of those paying homage to Scalia—the man who provided the title “Irreparable Harm” to Renata Adler’s analysis of Bush v. Gore—have done so perhaps a

Darryl Pinckney MTV News is relaunching with some big-name new hires from both old- and new-media, including Grantland’s former editorial director Dan Fierman, longtime Spin author Charles Aaron, Pitchfork Review editor Jessica Hopper, political author Ana Marie Cox, and the New Republic’s Jamil Smith (among others). The UK newspaper The Independent will publish its last print edition next month. Gawker’s executive editor John Cook has given his writers the go-ahead to make political donations (and to write about the candidates they give to) as long as they disclose their gift. In a memo to Gawker staff, Cook says: “Writing about

Michelle Alexander Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is to become a Broadway production, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, of The West Wing, The Newsroom, and The Social Network fame. Given Sorkin’s characteristic line on both the imaginary media and imaginary American politics, Atticus Finch is likely to remain a wise, lovable father figure in this version. And out there in the landscape of what you might choose to call real American politics, there is reading to be done ahead of tonight’s Democratic debate, starting with Michelle Alexander’s essential piece on Hillary Clinton and race. There’s also a

Heather Havrilesky Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are to be adapted for television, and the author will apparently be “working closely” with the producers on the project, which will shoot in Italy. To our relief, Politwoops relaunched in the US just in time for last night’s New Hampshire primary, so we will no longer be missing out on any of the candidates’ deleted tweets (that phrase seems to cry out for a Nixon joke, but we don’t have it in us this morning). Meanwhile, this account from Gawker of how Hillary Clinton’s staff arranges her press coverage is quite amazing. While

Matt Power Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter has organized a public marathon reading of War and Peace across more than thirty Russian cities this week: Readers include Vladimir Urin, director of the Bolshoi ballet, and the great Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda, who made Ashes and Diamonds. Applications for the second annual Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the grant honoring the acclaimed journalist who died on assignment in Uganda in 2014, are due February 16th. The Al Jazeera America shutdown is coming earlier than expected: The website will cease being updated at the end of this month, but you can still find the work

Alison Bechdel In an interview with Bill Maher on Friday, author Gloria Steinem, who is pro–Hillary Clinton, implied that women who support Bernie Sanders are just trying to meet men. “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” But after a group of Sanders supporters started an online petition requesting that she take the statement back, Steinem issued an apology: “In a case of talk-show Interruptus, I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics,” she wrote in a