Mark Bittman How to Cook Everything author Mark Bittman announced on Saturday that he’s leaving the New York Times, where he has been a food columnist for almost five years. The author, whose work for the Times has helped Americans eat food that is better for their health and for the environment, says that he will be taking “a central role in a year-old food company, to do what I’ve been writing about these many years: to make it easier for people to eat more plants.” He does not reveal the name of his new employer. In a new interview,

Michael Eric Dyson At the New Republic, Michael Eric Dyson traces the development of the “black digital intelligentsia.” On the Harper’s blog this week, Art Winslow claimed to have discovered the new Thomas Pynchon—or rather, the old one, using a pseudonym to publish Cow Country, a long and until now unsung novel that came out earlier this year. But now the spoilsports at New York magazine’s Vulture blog have gone and asked Penguin, who said: “We are Thomas Pynchon’s publisher and this is not a book by Thomas Pynchon.” Wayne Koestenbaum talked to Sarah Gerard about “sexualized formalist curiosity”

Rupert Murdoch The National Geographic Society has teamed up with Fox on a new for-profit media venture that will include its existing cable television channels and the famous magazine (Fox paid $725 million and will own 73 percent of the new company; the Society itself will remain a nonprofit, with a larger endowment). Rupert Murdoch isn’t fazed by those who object to the idea of a “climate-change denier” having such a major stake in the National Geographic—in any case, he prefers the term “skeptic.” Padgett Powell talks to Powells.com about Cries For Help, Various: Stories. “Well, it’s not the

Erica Jong If you were wondering who’d come off better in a disagreement on feminism between Erica Jong and Roxane Gay, here’s your answer. It seems Gawker Media will let you get away with saying almost anything on its sites, as long as you’re not paying to do so. Vox reports that Jezebel’s advertising team recently refused to run an ad in support of abortion rights, saying: “While Jezebel’s editorial content is very feminist, our advertising management team tends to be more conservative on the advertising we can accept.” Vox notes “a certain irony” in the idea of a

Dale Peck Next year, novelist-critic Dale Peck and OR Books cofounder John Oakes will relaunch The Evergreen Review, the legendary literary quarterly founded by Barney Rosset in 1957. Oakes will be the publisher, and Peck will act as the editor in chief. It has been revealed that Yi-Fen Chou, one of the contributors to this year’s edition of Best American Poetry, is a pseudonym that was used by Michael Derrick Hudson, a white poet who adopted the Chinese pen name because he thinks it’s a successful strategy for being published more often. Guest editor Sherman Alexie (whose list of

Jhumpa Lahiri Several writers are to be awarded the National Humanities Medal, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Larry McMurtry, and Annie Dillard. You’d think the Daily Mail would have grown a thicker skin by now, but in fact, DailyMail.com is suing Gawker for publishing some mean things about its editorial model (in the words of James King, a former freelance news writer for them, it involves “little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication”). And still they come: More digital journalists announce their intention to unionize, this time at Al Jazeera America.

Joy Williams Don DeLillo will receive this year’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He took the opportunity (via the Associated Press) to offer some career advice to other novelists: “It’s true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.” The New York Times magazine has a profile of Joy Williams, whose collected stories are about to be published—although she tells Dan Kois that most of them “aren’t getting close to what I’m trying to accomplish.”

Idris Elba The author of the latest James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, has had to apologize for his bizarre suggestion that Idris Elba was not suave enough to be the next 007. In France, the authors of a book critical of the Moroccan monarchy (originally set to come out in 2016) have been arrested and dropped by their publisher after they were caught accepting a $2.3 million bribe from one of the king’s representatives. “It’s human, no?” one of the writers, Catherine Graciet, told a French newspaper about her decision to take the money. “Everyone wonders what one could do with

Günter Grass As the death toll rises for people seeking refuge in Europe, Steidl has published the last book by Günter Grass, who died in April: The book contains an exhortation to his fellow Germans to display greater compassion towards refugees. “Why change a winning team?” asked Eula Biss’s literary agent, after they turned down a six-figure offer from a commercial house to take the paperback of On Immunity away from Graywolf Press. Boris Kachka (who notes that Graywolf authors have collected “four NBCC awards, a National Book Award, two Pulitzers, and a Nobel Prize” in the last six years) spoke to

Oliver Sacks Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, died on Sunday at age 82. Sacks announced in February that he had late-stage cancer. Sacks’s books, which include Hallucinations and Awakenings and the recent memoir On the Move, captured the mysterious workings of the human brain. In his 1985 book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he wrote about a patient with a parietal-lobe tumor, who tried “to kick his own left leg out of bed under the mistaken impression that someone has placed a cold cadaver limb beside him as a practical joke.” Jeb Bush likes bestsellers

Shulamith Firestone In a New York Times op-ed, Stephen King defends prolific novelists—Alexandre Dumas, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Asimov, himself—from the “snobbish, inane, and demonstrably untrue” suspicion that fewer books make for better books. Buzzfeed spoke to Claudia Rankine: “I wanted the book to exist in the space of the white liberal. Because people like to say ‘oh, it’s the South,’ ‘it’s ignorance,’ ‘it’s white supremacist Fox News.’ And I’m like, no, no, no. It’s white alliance with all of those things.” Someone’s trying to revamp books and publishing again—if you know how to do that, you’re invited to

Jonathan Franzen At New York, Christian Lorentzen has an essay on Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, in which he joins Elaine Blair in bringing “some skepticism to the dizzy proceedings,” and also considers the Franzen phenomenon more generally: “Do you love Jonathan Franzen? Does America? Does the world? These questions sound ridiculous, but they’re the ones Franzen has been posing over the past two decades, as he has, against long odds, made himself the kind of public figure about whom they aren’t entirely ridiculous or even unusual.” After two journalists were killed while on a routine assignment in Virginia, Poynter has some

Roz Chast Nearly twenty years into its history, the Thurber Prize for American Humor will finally be going to a woman (either Annabelle Gurwitch, Roz Chast, or Julie Schumacher) on September 28. Donald Trump and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes are continuing to do battle (for one thing, Trump revived his attack on Megyn Kelly last night). Ailes means well, according to an unnamed source who talked to Gabriel Sherman: “Roger says Trump is unelectable. His goal here is to save the country.” Music critic David Hajdu has gone out on a limb and made his own album. Being

Mario Vargas Llosa After announcing the death of culture in his new book, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa finds yet more evidence of it in a New York Times review (quite a trenchant and perceptive one, if you ask us) by Joshua Cohen. Vargas Llosa’s objection to some “slanderous and perfidious . . . gossip” originally included in the piece has prompted a long and delightful NYT correction. (Note to fact-checkers: the Daily Mail doesn’t count as a source.) The anti-diversity (or pro-”quality”) faction at sci-fi’s legendary Hugo Awards appears to have lost this round. Amid a “dystopian landscape”

Morrissey Morrissey, whose Autobiography was published by Penguin Classics in 2014, has announced that his first novel, List of the Lost, will be released in late September. The author and his publisher are offering up no other information. According to the Independent: “There are no details yet about what the novel will be about.” If commentators are attributing “megalomaniacal billionaire” Donald Trump’s political success to populism, what does that say about our definition of populism? Not much, says Rich People Things author and Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann. “The Beltway definition of populism is disdainful.” Trump’s success at tapping into

Jonathan Franzen Carli Lloyd, who captained the US national women’s soccer team at this year’s World Cup, is publishing a memoir. Too bad David Foster Wallace isn’t around to review it. And, apparently one primary function of the DFW film has been to make magazine-profile writers feel like a bunch of creeps. People still can’t decide how to feel about H. P. Lovecraft. Someone has translated the dream journal of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, discoverer of neurons, who wrote down his dreams from 1918 and his death in 1934 in an attempt to disprove Freud’s theories. “Writing novels seemed like

Donald Trump At the New York Times magazine, Steven Johnson has crunched the numbers and says, contra years of post-Napster scaremongering about what the digital economy would do to artists and writers, that creative types are still mostly doing fine. Donald Trump celebrates himself and sings himself on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter. Asked when he last apologized for something, he says: “It was too many years ago to remember. I have one of the great memories of all time, but it was too long ago.” On the competition: Hillary Clinton’s email debacle was “Watergate on steroids”; Jeb

Joan Didion The New York Times searches its soul over whether its Amazon story was fair. Meanwhile, the Onion, not for the first time, struggles to preserve the distinction between its satire and straight reporting. Mostly ignoring the chic starriness that clings to Joan Didion in so much of the coverage of her, Louis Menand traces the significant change in Didion’s work and worldview through the decades. Plus there’s a nice nod to the art of the disclaimer: “(Full disclosure: you are reading this piece in The New Yorker).” Who’d be Gawker’s lawyer? Only the brave. The Center for Fiction announced

Renata Adler Renata Adler expressed her solidarity with Buzzfeed writers when she went to their HQ for an interview earlier this year: “The embarrassing part about writing something, and having it published, is the part right after when you’re thinking, Oh my god, what are people going to think? If you’re having one piece every three years, that’s it, it’s done. But if you have to write three times a week, the only way to get rid of the embarrassment is to try the next piece, and hope it will be better, and erase the last piece. Which is

Robert Christgau actual facts, starting now.” Between 1960 and the early 1970s, the FBI assembled a file on author James Baldwin that contains 1,884 pages. Dan Duray recently re-read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and was reminded that Patrick Bateman, the titular character, worshipped  Donald Trump.