Lionel Shriver. Photo: Andrew Crowley Ohio University has decided to remove alumnus and former Fox News president Roger Ailes’s name from a student newsroom at the school, and will return the $500,000 donation Ailes made in 2007. Scholarships awarded in Ailes’s name will continue. The Man Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. Finalists include Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, David Szalay’s All That Man Is, and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing. At a press conference, the prize’s literary director Gaby Wood responded to criticism

Isabel Allende On September 10, the Turkish government arrested and detained novelist Ahmet Altan and his brother Mehmet Altan, a writer and professor of economics. According to a letter of protest, the two men have been accused of “somehow giving subliminal messages to rally coup supporters on a television panel show broadcast 14 July, the night before the coup attempt.” A group of writers including Salman Rushdie, Elena Ferrante, and JM Coetzee have signed the letter demanding the Altans’ release. Fast Company takes a long look at Jack Dorsey’s plans for the future of Twitter, “a kaleidoscopic quest featuring

Jeffrey Toobin Univision, which bought Gawker Media in auction last month, has voted to remove six posts from still-running sites like Jezebel and Deadspin, saying that the posts are legal risks. John Cook, the executive editor of Gawker Media, wrote to his staff that deleting the articles, such as “Wait, Did Clowntroll Blogger Chuck Johnson Shit on the Floor One Time?,” was “a mistake”: “Disappearing true posts about public figures simply because they have been targeted by a lawyer who conspired with a vindictive billionaire to destroy this company is an affront to the very editorial ethos that has

Alan Moore. Photo: Matt Biddulph Barnes and Noble announced a fourteen-million-dollar loss for its most recent quarter, with sales dropping 6.6 percent. The troubled company is searching for a new CEO as Amazon continues to chip away at their business. In an attempt to lure customers back into the bookstore, BN will be opening four new trial stores this fall that will have a restaurant serving food, beer, and wine. The first, set to open in Eastchester, New York this October is also planning to have a fire pit and bocce court.  The public libraries of Washington, DC will

Lisa Lucas. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan Beacon Press is launching an imprint dedicated to audio books. Beacon Press Audio’s first edition will be Jerald Walker’s The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult, and will be followed by aural versions of backlist titles, including one by James Baldwin. Today, the Trump campaign ends its blacklist of various news outlets who have been critical of the candidate. The Washington Post, Politico, and others will have their requests for press credentials approved. About the reversal, Trump told CNN, “I figure they can’t treat me any worse!”

Margot Lee Sheerly. photo: Aran Shetterly Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles has been named chief content officer at Hearst magazines, and will be the first person at the company to hold the position. Coles will “identify new business opportunities and partnerships for Hearst in areas including television and live events, with the goal of extending the company’s brands beyond just print magazines and websites.” Michele Promaulayko, formerly the editor of Yahoo Health and Women’s Health, will be Cosmopolitan’s new editor in chief. New York magazine national affairs editor and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman has been named a contributor to

Tobias Wolff. Photo: Mark Coggins Gabriel Sherman’s long-expected deep dive into the sexual harassment allegations against former Fox News President Roger Ailes went live this weekend. Sherman, the author of the book The Loudest Voice in the Room, chronicles Ailes’s career trajectory—defined by ”his volcanic temper, paranoia, and ruthlessness”—along with his rise and fall at Fox News. After Ailes’s departure, employees “described feeling like being part of a totalitarian regime whose dictator has just been toppled.” “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” an unnamed Fox host told Sherman. “After the election, the prime-time lineup

Yaa Gyasi. Photo: Michael Lionstar The New York Times books section and the paper’s Sunday Book Review will no longer be separate entities. On the Recode Media podcast, Assistant Masthead Editor Clifford Levy said, “We have to be willing to try new things, and if they fail, that’s fine.” The two teams will be merged under the guidance of Book Review editor Pamela Paul, who told Publishers Weekly that the move will reduce redundant reviews: “‘There will no longer be any instances of two freelancers reviewing the same books.” In today’s business section, the Times’s internal email system assists

Gabriel Sherman. Photo: Nephi Niven An upcoming exposé by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine has Roger Ailes’s lawyers denouncing the writer to the Daily Beast. “Gabe Sherman is a virus, and is too small to exist on his own, and has obviously attached himself to the Ailes family to try to suck the life out of them,” Marc Mukasey told the news site. “Roger is fine and doing well, and is not going to allow a virus like that to poison the atmosphere.” Susan Estrich, the feminist attorney who surprised everyone by taking the Ailes case, said that

John F. Nash. Photo: Peter Badge President Barack Obama will be the guest-editor of Wired’s November issue, on the subject of “Frontiers.” “When the Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they were at the bleeding edge of Enlightenment philosophy and technology,” said Wired editor in chief Scott Dadich. “We want to wrestle with the idea of how today’s technology can influence political leadership. And who better to help us explore these ideas than President Obama?” Despite rampant speculation about Trump’s plans to launch a media project after losing the general election, Bloomberg says it might take

Hasan Minhaj Hasan Minhaj, a Daily Show senior correspondent, is collaborating with PEN America to launch “The M Word,” an event series that “will provide a platform for Muslim-American writers and cultural figures to address audiences on their own terms . . . to challenge the prevailing narrow representations of highly diverse Muslim communities comprised of more than three million Americans.” Minhaj will be part of a panel on Muslim comedians on September 21. The MTA is collaborating with Penguin Random House to launch “Subway Reads, a web platform that can be reached from a subway platform.” The program

Ian McEwan. Photo: Thesupermat Google has finally revealed why it shut down novelist Dennis Cooper’s blog and canceled his email account earlier this summer. On his Facebook page, Cooper writes that “some unknown person’s flagging of one image on a ten year-old group-curated page that wasn’t even technically on my blog is the reason they disabled my blog and email account.” Late last week, Cooper announced that Google has agreed to release the decade’s worth of data and archives from his blog. Cooper’s blog—“in a new, non-Google spot”—relaunches today. Director Harmony Korine is working on an adaptation of Alissa

Marilynne Robinson Marilynne Robinson has won the Richard C. Holbrooke award for her writing, which Dayton Literary Peace Prize founder Sharon Rab praised for being “concerned with the issues that define the . . . prize: forgiveness, the sacredness of the human creature and delight in being alive and experiencing the natural world.” PEN Center USA announced the 2016 Literary Award winners, including a prize for journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong for their investigation, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” for ProPublica and the Marshall Project. Translator Deborah Smith, who along with author Han Kang won the Man

Truman Capote Bob Odenkirk will write “a comic ‘bildungsroman’ . . . except this will be more memoir and the main character, Bob Odenkirk (actor, writer, comedian, gadabout), doesn’t grow morally or psychologically.” Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation is still fixated on his former character, Ron Swanson, and has written a new book about his East LA woodshop, to be released in October. Pretty Little Liars’s Ian Harding, who plays writer and former English teacher Ezra Fitz, will release Odd Bird, a book of essays on life and bird watching, next spring. Robert Seethaler, a character actor who

National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo: Rex Hammock Vinson Cunningham writes on the soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the century-long “bureaucratic slog” required to make it happen. Founding director Lonnie Bunch has been at work on the project since 2005. His unconventional techniques included Antiques Roadshow–style acquisitions, but his vision for the building might be the most striking: “I didn’t want the white marble building that traditionally was the Mall. What I wanted to say was, there’s always been a dark presence in America that people undervalue, neglect,

Daisuke Wakabayashi Gawker’s last day was Monday, and the tributes, remembrances, justifications, and arguments continue to pour in from its former writers and editors, while Josh Laurito, of the Gawker Data Team, crunches the numbers (in total, Gawker has received about 7 billion pageviews of 202,370 posts). Alex Balk writes about the website’s vaunted maxim, “honesty is our only virtue,” and considers the ways in which it did not always live up to that ideal: “Gawker’s biggest lies were the ones it told about itself. But these errors were small in scale when measured up against the pervasive duplicity

Matt Bissonnette Matt Bissonnette, the former Navy SEAL who wrote No Easy Day, an account of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, will forfeit $6.8 million in royalties for failing to get Pentagon clearance for the book. Bissonnette wrote the best-seller under the pen name Mark Owen. Ohio University has yet to decide on whether they will rename the Roger E. Ailes Newsroom, which was paid for with donations from the former Fox News president. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan hopes that Carlson will resist the urge to settle her sexual harassment case: “Already, the righteous wound she

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Wired has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. “If it’s true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for,” writes editor Scott Dadich. “Trump’s campaign started out like something from The Onion. Now it has moved into George Orwell–as–interpreted–by–Paul Verhoeven territory.” “She just seems to me really intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable,” Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told HuffPo, of Ivanka Trump. “I just imagine that

Pamela Paul Amazon will produce a film titled Ida Tarbell about the journalist of the same name whose nineteen-article series, “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” was serialized in McClure’s Magazine at the turn of the twentieth century. Tarbell shed light on the dirty doings of John D. Rockefeller and was one of the first so-called muckrakers, a label she rejected: “I was convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced.” “To a remarkable degree our daily book

Chuck Palahniuk Univision was the top bidder in yesterday’s Gawker auction, landing the site for $135 million. The Wall Street Journal reports that founder Nick Denton will no longer be involved with Gawker after the sale goes through.  Pagan Kennedy—the author of Inventology: How We Dream Up Things that Change the World and the novel The Exes, among other books—has signed a contract to become a regular contributing writer for the New York Times’s Opinion section. For the twentieth anniversary of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the author explained that the book “was originally written as a kind of reinvention