Poet and professor Matthew Zapruder is taking over as poetry column editor for the New York Times magazine as of this week. He takes pleasure in the idea that a poem placed in the magazine can “follow up on, refract, amplify, reconfigure, the language of culture and news. . . . The poem gets a chance to exist in a place that is not isolated or rarified. It gets to be a part of life, and we get to read it that way, too.”
Adam Johnson has won this year’s Story Prize for Fortune Smiles, the collection that also won him the National Book Award (Johnson is the first to win both prizes for the same book).
A new book collects the thoughts of memoirists about memoir, including this delightful insight from Edmund White, quoted in the New York Times: “In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs. If I lose the friendship, so what? . . . On the other hand I sometimes say the best way to keep a secret is to publish it, since no one reads. My books aren’t indexed. So anyone who wants to know what I wrote about him has to read the whole thing.”
An only ever so slightly chilling look inside People magazine’s dedicated Snapchat operation.
And in his Baffler column, Chris Lehmann marvels at Vice Media’s new cable network and some of the “mind-stretching Borgesian glory” to be found therein.
Some researchers have helpfully both identified the graffiti artist Banksy and, in the process, raised a few questions about the techniques apparently used to unmask serial killers.