Lucia Berlin “What did people do before Prozac?” Lucia Berlin wrote in a letter to Lydia Davis. “Beat up horses I guess.” You can read a version of Davis’s foreword to Berlin’s stories on the New Yorker site (so do). Better to read Moby-Dick on your phone than not to read it at all. Jay Parini writes about Gore Vidal’s greatest feuds and the “effort, strenuous at times” to stay friends with him. And poor David Foster Wallace has been dragged into an arcaneargument about who counts as a bro in the literary world. Still, Joan Didion has a

Patti Smith You may remember the UK’s former PM, Tony Blair. Judging by recent polls, his once-progressive party, Labour, may soon return to something like its pre-Blair roots, as left-wing social democrat Jeremy Corbyn seems poised to win the leadership. Now, at the ready with metaphors mixed—are Labour Party members playing sports? Sleepwalking outside? Scripting a horror film?—Blair has published what might be the op-ed of the year: “The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. . . . It is a moment for a rugby tackle if that were

Jonathan Franzen The Intercept turns the surveillance tables on an NSA analyst, the so-called “Socrates of SIGINT,” who, it turns out, also writes fiction. At the Atlantic, Caleb Crain reviews the new Jonathan Franzen. Surely it must be nearly time for Nell Zink to share her thoughts too. The still-newish New Republic is redesigning itself, more or less eliminating any distinction between the print and web versions along the way. No matter what they do, former literary editor Leon Wieseltier is predictably unimpressed. Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing are going to publish books together—Catapult will be open for

Ta-Nehisi Coates Yesterday a state of emergency was declared in Ferguson after another police shooting. Meanwhile, in an interview about his book Between the World and Me, Roxane Gay asks Ta-Nehisi Coates whether it ever feels “all too much,” when seemingly “every week, if not every day, we have a new tragedy to mourn.” He responds: “Never. This has always been life. . . . I know we’re in this new moment where it seems like the police have suddenly gone crazy. But police violence is not new and it is only the most spectacular end of a range of

John Darnielle Vice’s editorial staff has voted to unionize, following quickly in the footsteps of writers and editors at Gawker media and Salon. In a statement, Vice CEO Shane Smith responded to the vote with grandiose paternal affection: “I’m so proud of all my perfect diamonds here at Vice. Every single day your ideas and work continue to blow me away. I am proud to support all of you—and as an old grey-haired man all I want is for my beautiful Vice family to be happy—those writers who voted to unionize and those who did not. I love you

Rand Paul It’s not easy to out-drama-queen Donald Trump (whose unexpected success in the presidential race has inspired publisher Thomas Dunne to hurry a new biography into print), but Rand Paul and Chris Christie seem to have managed it at last night’s debate. You probably noticed that Melville House has brought out the Pope’s encyclical on climate change as a book. But you may not know that Pope Francis is now also a Verso author. You can get hold of his latest work, hailed as “an urgent call to action,” here for free—and you won’t want to miss it. Clickbait with

Thanks to a lawsuit by the Guardian, more information has now emerged about the “off-the-books interrogation compound” in Chicago’s Homan Square—we now know that more than 3,500 people have been detained there, “82% of whom a Guardian independent investigation found to be black,” and there have been “only three documented visits from lawyers to the building since September 2004.”

Robert Conquest The historian Robert Conquest has died. Best known for his work on Stalin’s purges, he was also a Movement poet who edited sci-fi anthologies and collaborated on a novel with his friend Kingsley Amis—and apparently now and then got credit for one of Amis’s “jokes.” The political cartoonist Ted Rall, dropped by the Los Angeles Times after the LAPD disputed his account of being “roughed up” by an officer in 2001, has had an audio recording of the incident cleaned up and is considering a lawsuit (against both the Times and the police). Note to redditors: Apparently

F. Scott Fitzgerald Jason Fine, the current editor of Men’s Journal, will be the new managing editor of Rolling Stone, taking over from Will Dana, with whom publisher Jann Wenner says he has had “a conscious uncoupling” after the magazine’s difficulties over its retracted UVA article. The once-scrappy Charlie Hebdo doesn’t know what to do with all its money. The new venture from veteran entertainment journalist Nikki Finke (she of Deadline Hollywood) has gone live. “Once you get past F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara,” she told Jezebel, there are not nearly enough short stories about Hollywood, so she’s

Etger Keret Etger Keret’s new book, The Seven Good Years, is a collection of personal essays about life in Israel, but there are currently no plans to publish it in Hebrew, or in his home country. Keret—whose previous work has consisted mostly of short, whimsical, and surreal fiction—recently told the Guardian that he wrote the book for people outside the country. He explains: “If I talk about going to a maternity ward with my wife and all the medics are with people from a bombing, for an Israeli person that is so normal that it hardly merits any attention.”

Emergency staff take over at Gawker: Leah Beckman steps up as editor-in-chief, Hamilton Nolan steps in as her deputy, and John Cook has agreed (apparently after some hesitation) to be the new executive editor. The International Business Times got hold of Cook’s reassuring memo to the troops: “I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s a— and say we’ve weathered the storm and hop on board we’re headed to victory. But we are all still here . . . and we have at our disposal—right now, at your fingertips—an immense and powerful machine for illuminating, skewering, praising, and changing the

Ted Rall’s cartoon for the LA Times Political cartoonist and author Ted Rall—who has written books about Afghanistan and Edward Snowden—has announced on his blog that he has been fired by the Los Angeles Times, where he has been a regular contributor since 2009. The reason for the firing, says editorial-page editor Nicholas Goldberg, is a cartoon that Rall published in the paper in May, in which the artist recalled being handcuffed and roughed up by the LAPD after he was stopped for jaywalking. According to Goldberg, the LAPD has provided evidence that it did not mistreat Rall: “An

Edwidge Danticat The Booker Prize longlist has just been announced. The New York Times rebuts the New York Review of Books’s rebuttal (by a Times journalist turned day spa owner) of their nail-salon exposé. Amazon—or Relentless, as it was originally to be called—now has plans to reserve a two-hundred-foot slice of airspace for its drones. As migrants cross the border from the Dominican Republic, Edwidge Danticat writes from Haiti. Ursula K. Le Guin has started an online forum for writers of fiction, where she plans to answer questions about craft (or open them to the floor) every other Monday. She

For those who like their New York Times It’s hard to look away from New York magazine’s cover story on thirty-five of Bill Cosby’s accusers, but some hackers did their best to help with that. Anyone who doesn’t like the idea of a softened-up Gawker has been invited to take the money and get out: William Arkin, former national security adviser to the New York Times and founder of Gawker’s national security spin-off, was asked to go and had some things to say about it. Leah Finnegan—also ex-NYT—is leaving too. “Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways and

Mary Jo Bang The British education organization Pearson, which sold the Financial Times last week, has confirmed that it plans to sell its 50 percent stake in The Economist magazine. According to Politico, “Existing Economist shareholders led by John Elkann, heir to the Italian Agnelli industrial fortune and a member of the magazine’s board, are working on a potential buyout of Pearson’s stake.” If that plan falls through, “one option under discussion is for an investment bank to purchase the remaining shares to allow Pearson to cash out.” Don Winslow’s The Cartel, which came out in late June, is

Pearson, the education and publishing giant, You can |http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535865/flip-side-by-james-franco-and-david-shields/#|already pre-order| Flip-Side: Real and Imaginary Conversations with Lana Del Rey, the latest provocation by Renaissance man James Franco, for whom just publishing a single LDR-themed poem apparently wasn’t nearly enough. His co-author is David Shields of Reality Hunger fame. If the concept doesn’t seem promising, perhaps you’re forgetting this special issue of The New Inquiry; come to think of it, we could all do worse than to reread that, and leave Franco’s version alone. Angelina Jolie is directing an adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir of Cambodia under Pol Pot for

Rupert Murdoch Rupert Murdoch apparently wants Fox News to stop sucking up to Donald Trump, but can’t get his CEO Roger Ailes in line. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire suggests everyone go for the one approach to Trump they haven’t yet tried: take him seriously. The New York Times doesn’t like Nick Denton’s accusation that it moves journalists off certain beats to appease advertisers with less “toothy” coverage. Denton made the comments in a long scandal-postmortem editorial meeting early this week, in which he explained to his staff that the “Gawker tax”—essentially, the ad revenue they lose

E. L. Doctorow Those who wonder what a post-Gawker internet might look like were treated to a preview on Monday when both it and Jezebel went dark during editorial wranglings over that disputed post. One Gawker writer, musing on his editorial experiences elsewhere and on the ethics of outing or not outing, hopes it won’t come to that, concluding: “I would rather work at a place that’s bold enough to fuck up than one that is too afraid to ever risk it.” And editors elsewhere use the occasion to discuss their worst mistakes—here’s Jimmy Jellinek of Playboy on what

Nick Denton Whatever else one says about Gawker, they reallyknowhowtomakethemselvesthestory. (But should you only have time for one of those links, make it the one in which resigning executive editor Tommy Craggs calls this latest incident “Nick’s Reichstag fire.”) If you missed Jonathan Franzen’s sometime protégée Nell Zink reviewing the new Jonathan Franzen (and as we’ve said before, what could be better than a review by someone who really knows you?), it looks as if you’re still out of luck. (A real shame, because one possible answer to the previous question is “a review preceded by the words: ‘On

Michel Houellebecq On Friday afternoon, Gawker management removed its controversial item outing a Conde Nast CFO. Outcry against the post seemed to be almost unanimous. Glenn Greenwald called it “reprehensible beyond belief” and Lena Dunham deemed it “cruel and unnecessary.” According to Gawker CEO Nick Denton, “It was an editorial call, a close call around which there were more internal disagreements than usual. And it is a decision I regret.” But editor Max Read continues to defend the piece: “given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives.”