Sarah Koenig New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has sent staffers a memo announcing a fairly major overhaul, including cuts in the newsroom and elsewhere: “Simply put, we keep turning things on—greater visual journalism, live news blogs, faster enterprise, podcasting, racing against an ever-growing list of new competitors on an expanding list of stories—without ever turning things off,” he writes. From now on, “everything we do must either be part of

Next Friday, February 12, Bookforum will host a Valentine’s reading at the New Museum. “Trial and Error,” a tribute to love’s vicissitudes (in previous years we’ve named it “Bad Trips,” “Wasted Youth,” and “The Night We Called it a Day”), will feature readings by Mary Gaitskill, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Marx, A. O. Scott, and Christopher Sorrentino. No one seems quite ready to believe that Amazon now plans to open hundreds of physical bookstores, but if you’re on the west coast, weren’t put off by that New York Times story, and have “the ability to lift 50 lbs,” you might

Christopher Cox Christopher Cox, who was promoted to editor in chief of Harper’s just three months ago, has been abruptly fired by the publisher and president, John R. MacArthur, seemingly over Cox’s support of a plan to redesign the magazine’s cover. The rest of the staff reportedly opposed the firing of Cox, who has done great work in his several years at the magazine. Roger D. Hodge, a previous editor of Harper’s who was fired in 2010 after a four-year tenure, told the New York Times that he too had had conflict with MacArthur over editorial matters, and that he

If you can take your eyes off the The New Yorker has a review of Frederick Seidel’s new book of “suave and vengeful” poems: “If the id had an id, and it wrote poetry, the results might sound like Widening Income Inequality (Farrar, Straus Giroux), Frederick Seidel’s sixteenth collection. . . . American poets like to think of their art as open, democratic, all-­embracing; few aside from Seidel have imagined the lyric poem to be an exclusive haunt of self-flattering, hedonistic élites. Seidel is securely on the winner’s side of the widening wealth gap; the implication, if we’re reading him,

Meredith Wild Simon Schuster’s imprint Gallery Books has announced that it will publish a new biography of David Bowie by Paul Morley, who recently helped Grace Jones with her recent book I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. Morley’s book, The Age of Bowie, is scheduled to appear late this year. MTV News has been on a hiring spree—earlier in January, the company brought in five former employees of Grantland, the ESPN-owned sports and pop-culture website that closed its doors late last year. Now, in an effort to boost its political coverage, MTV has hired author and Wonkette founder Ana Marie

As if primary season weren’t providing enough drama, that Washington institution Politico, in what has been described as “ French New Wave director and critic Jacques Rivette, who made landmark films such as Paris nous appartient and the Jamesian fantasy Céline and Julie Go Boating, and edited Cahiers du Cinéma in the mid-1960s, has died at the age of 87. The New Yorker’s Page Turner has a piece about South Korea’s Nobel Prize in Literature deficit and the country’s efforts to do something about it. The piece quotes an English professor there who runs a website about Korean literature and

Rebekah Brooks If the work of Franco Moretti so far represents the limit of your understanding of the statistical analysis of literature, get ready for the denizens of Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics, who have been busy discovering fractals and multifractals in most of our major works. Though, perhaps a little churlishly, they note that the “fractality of a literary text will in practice never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics.” The Washington news director for Bloomberg Politics, Kathy Kiely, has resigned because she feels the company would be severely hampered in any serious attempt to

James Fenimore Cooper While Arianna Huffington may no longer be treating Donald Trump’s campaign as more entertainment than politics, Trump himself evidently does view it as a media story. Announcing that he planned to skip Thursday’s Republican debate after a stand-off with Fox News (over the network’s refusal to replace Megyn Kelly as moderator), he said: “Let’s see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me.” Much to everyone’s chagrin, it seems that David Bowie had better things to do than write his memoirs. Today Library of America launches a new twice-monthly column, The

Tense usage in Ellie award winners, Burt Helm and Max Chafkin Few things are more pleasing than when the news delivers the kind of twist we expect from a best seller: Congratulations to Planned Parenthood, after a grand jury declined to indict anyone from the organization, choosing instead to bring charges against the members of an anti-abortion group who had attempted to entrap them. The group that owns The Guardian, whose financial position turns out to be much weaker than it previously appeared, has announced that it will slash its budget by 20 percent in order to stop losing

Rachel Kushner Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary Author: The Real JT Leroy Story had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, and Amazon quickly acquired the film over the weekend. Laura Albert, the woman who pretended to be Leroy (and fooled a lot of people), attended the premiere, and told the audience that she is (surprise) working on a memoir. The New York Times has now been publishing online content for twenty years. Janet Malcolm does not think much of Jonathan Bate’s biography of Ted Hughes. Malcolm—who has written brilliantly about psychoanalysis and about Hughes and his wife,

Leon Wieseltier The New Republic’s well-known former literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who apparently “laughed loudly” on the record when asked if he planned to buy back the soon-to-be-abandoned TNR, is instead |http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/leon-wieseltier-teaming-up-with-steve-jobs-widow.html#|going into business| with Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, on a new literary journal. (New York magazine’s post about this, incidentally, includes a delightful parenthesis about another of Jobs’s media side-projects, OZY Media, “curiously named after the Shelley poem ‘Ozymandias’ — you know, the one about the face-planted statue of a formerly important king: ‘Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!/No thing beside remains…’

Eileen Myles A campaign called Stop Hate Dump Trump has been launched by a large group of notables, including Angela Davis, Cindy Sherman, and Cornel West, who are criticizing both the Trump campaign and the media responsible for “normalising Trump’s extremism by treating it as entertainment, by giving it inordinate and unequal air time and by refusing to interrogate it or condemn it.” Win some, lose some: Gawker has found a new investor, but it’s also become the subject of yet another lawsuit. A stage version of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, now on in Boston starring

Spanish broadcaster Univision has bought a substantial stake in the satirical media company The Onion for something approaching $200 million, which, as Bloomberg’s Brooke Sutherland notes, would put The Onion’s overall value at around $500 million: “To put that in perspective, it’s twice what Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post in 2013. You read that right.” To Sutherland that’s a sign that print may really be on its last legs after all.

C. L. R. James At an event yesterday in Harlem marking Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Chris Rock read from James Baldwin’s famous letter to his nephew. And Viewpoint magazine has reproduced a fascinating letter by C. L. R. James, author of the landmark study of the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins, about his 1957 meeting with King, their discussion of tactics in the Montgomery bus boycott, and “the always unsuspected power of the mass movement.” The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced, including Vivian Gornick and Margo Jefferson in autobiography, Colm Tóibín, Maggie Nelson,

Adelle Waldman In “The World’s Longest Out-of-Office Message,” Choire Sicha explains why he’s taking a sabbatical from The Awl. One reason: “I’ve taken on various roles and learned a lot about small businesses. But small businesses do things eccentrically. Independent media definitely does things eccentrically. I’d like to go look at how other people do things, maybe try on new ways of being. Then I’m going to steal all these ideas and use them here. :)” While on leave, Sicha will continue to share (with Alex Balk) the company’s voting rights, so he will “maintain the privilege of weighing in

C. D. Wright The poet C. D. Wright—whose books include Cooling Time (2005) and the award-winning One with Others (2010)—died earlier this week. Her book Shallcross is scheduled for publication in April. At the New Yorker, Ben Lerner reflects on Wright’s “peculiar brilliance,” and writes that “she was part of a line of mavericks and contrarians who struggled to keep the language particular in times of ever-encroaching standardization.” And at the Awl, poet Mark Bibbins posts Wright’s “only the crossing counts”: “It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off / the air. You never know, do you.

Eileen Myles In the second media surprise of the week, Al Jazeera America, which employs hundreds of people, has abruptly announced that it will close down all operations in April. “As things get worse,” Eileen Myles says to Ana Marie Cox in an interview, “poetry gets better, because it becomes more necessary.” Myles also notes that “if the voters rose up with a write-in campaign, then of course” she would make a second run for the presidency. Seems fair to say we need her more than ever. The shortlist is up for this year’s “moronic, informative, all-consuming, fascinating, weirdly

Parul Sehgal You can read the text of last night’s State of the Union address here. After considering candidates for nearly a year, the New York Times has chosen Jim Rutenberg (currently chief political correspondent for the Times magazine) as the successor to its beloved media columnist David Carr. And the new owner of the Village Voiceis rehiring editor in chief Will Bourne, who quit a couple of years ago after only a few months because he was unwilling to fire more good people. Critic and Bookforum contributor Parul Sehgal has a new column in the New York Times

David Bowie, American Library Association Writers from Hilton Als to Marlon James responded yesterday to the loss of the inimitable David Bowie, and many recalled the books he loved most. (In a 1998 Proust questionnaire, Bowie’s answers, respectively, to “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” and “What is the quality you most like in a man?” were “Reading,” and ”The ability to return books.”) Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes has announced that running a magazine (or finding “a workable business model” for one) is a lot harder than he’d hoped: “After investing a great deal of time, energy, and

Bowie, 1967 Aside from everything else you could say about David Bowie—surely one of the greatest shapeshifting pop stars in history—he also had excellent taste in literature. Via Electric Lit, here’s a list of Bowie’s one hundred favorite books. And from the 2011 volumeDavid Bowie: Any Day Now, The London Years 1947–1974, a few images of the starman from his late 1960s and early ’70s heyday: \