Nick Denton. Photo: Grace Villamil Gawker goes on the auction block today, and will sell for at least $90 million (less than half of what owner Nick Denton thinks it’s worth). Possible buyers include Univision, New York magazine, and Vox. Peter Thiel thinks that Gawker is not the last battle in the fight to keep the media out of people’s sex lives. In a New York Times op-ed, he writes about the now-retracted Daily Beast article that outed athletes in Rio, praises Republicans at the RNC for accepting him as a gay man, and promotes the so-called “Gawker Bill,”

William Gibson. Photo: Fred Armitage Tsehai Publishers is launching an imprint in honor of Harriet Tubman, publishing fiction, nonfiction, and academic works focused on African American issues in the US. The imprint, a joint effort with Loyola Marymount University, will publish its first book, Voices From Leimert Park, this fall. Shannon Paulus writes about the lack of independent fact checking in book publishing, after an excerpt of Luke Dittrich’s Patient H.M. in the New York Times called the accuracy of Dittrich’s book into question: “I’ve long wished that fact-checked material would carry some kind of stamp on it noting if it

Arianna Huffington. Photo: David Shankbone in a statement that “there are inaccuracies in the details and unfair portrayals but rather than go back and forth with BuzzFeed, we are going to continue our work on making Twitter a safer place.” After a British woman was stopped by airport police for reading Syria Speaks: Art and Culture From the Frontline, the publisher has ordered a reprint of the book due to rising sales.  PEN America is resurrecting the PEN/Nabokov Award, focusing on international writers. In their announcement, president Andrew Solomon called the award “a welcome counterbalance to rampant xenophobia and

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Village Voice editor in chief Will Bourne will be leaving the publication. A statement from the paper said that Bourne “stepped down,” but a tweet from the former editor suggested otherwise: “Actually I was fired. If we’re being honest with ourselves/your readers.” After eleven years, Huffington Post co-founder, president, and editor in chief Arianna Huffington is resigning from her namesake website. Huffington tweeted that though she “thought HuffPo would be Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was in London last weekend for a celebration of Half of a Yellow Sun’s tenth

George Orwell Amid rumors of a coming settlement between Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media, employees are urging their prospective new owners to abide by their previously negotiated union contract. “We look forward to building a constructive relationship of mutual respect with the new owners,” read a statement released by Gawker staff. “This can only happen under the terms of our union contract.” Former co-founder of The Verge Josh Topolsky continues his attempts to explain just who the readers of his new project, The Outline, will be. “They live in urban areas. They’re really tech-savvy. They fund Kickstarter projects. They

Women’s epee. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen The George R. R. Martin–edited series “Wild Cards” is getting a TV adaptation. The show is being developed by Universal Cable Productions, responsible for Mr. Robot and 12 Monkeys. Martin will not be involved due to fealty to HBO’s Game of Thrones and the pressure he’s under to finish Winds of Winter, the final installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin writes that assistant editor Melinda Snodgrass and producer Gregory Noveck, who will be working on the TV version, “know and love the Wild Cards universe almost as well as I do.”

James Baldwin. Photo: Allan Warren New York Times public editor Liz Spayd explains the paper’s new Metro section, which will cut back on local news (which is “of no interest to readers in Beijing or London”) and focus more on “stories with larger, more consequential themes.” Using the story of a fire in the Bronx that killed two young children as an example, Spayd and Metro editor Wendell Jamieson argue that “when 90 percent of your audience lives outside New York, it makes sense to skip the small stuff and write stories with the kind of wattage that attracts

Haruki Murakami. Photo: wakarimasita A British woman was stopped by airport security after a crew member on her flight home to the UK reported her to police for reading Malu Halasa’s award-winning book Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline. “Ironically, a part of my job is working on anti-radicalisation,” Faizah Shaheen told The Independent, “assessing vulnerable young people with mental health problems

George R. R. Martin. Photo: Henry Söderlund The Forbes list of 2016’s highest-paid writers notes that “the written word isn’t dead—although television and movie adaptations often help drive sales.” James Patterson, whose novel Zoo was adapted into a TV series that’s now in its second season, topped the list. Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney came in second, most likely thanks to the slew of movies made from his books. George R. R. Martin placed twelfth with $9.5 million, but Forbes worries that his slow writing pace and the end of the HBO version of Game of

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Larry D. Moore Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, was released yesterday, one month early, in a surprise move to coincide with the announcement of its inclusion in Oprah’s book club. For now, the book is only available in the Oprah-approved format. This weekend, the Times will feature a 16,000 word excerpt of the book, but only in print. The Times might be the next news outlet to find itself on the Trump media blacklist. After insinuating as much at a campaign event, the candidate sat down with Sean Hannity to call out the newspaper

Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea Poet and writer Kevin Young will be taking over for historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Young is currently a professor and curator of rare books at Emory University, “where he helped spearhead a number of major acquisitions, including archives of Jack Kerouac . . . Flannery O’Connor and Lucille Clifton.” Yale University Press London has laid off the distinguished art editors Gillian Malpass and Sally Salvesen. The decision received a strong rebuke from the scholarly community, with more than three-hundred

J. K. Rowling Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2013, has signed a book deal with Bloomsbury to write his autobiography. Last Testament, to be co-written with German journalist Peter Seewald, will be released internationally in November. The book describes his childhood during the Third Reich, charts his rise to the papacy, and, the press materials suggest, grapples with his shortcomings at the Vatican: “His account deals with the controversies that rocked the Catholic world—how he enraged the Muslim world with his Regensburg speech, what he did and did not do to stamp out the clerical sexual abuse of

Stephen Elliott. Photo: Larry D. Moore Washington Post reporter Jose A. DelReal was denied entry to a Mike Pence rally in Wisconsin, even after he had stored his cellphone and laptop in his car at the request of security. Erik Wemple has a round-up of the many troubling aspects of Trump’s adversarial relationship with the press. Observer writer Lincoln Mitchell is the latest employee to resign from the newspaper owned by Trump’s son-in-law. Trump held an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit Wednesday night which did not actually allow anyone to ask him “anything.” The AMA was held in a

James Alan McPherson James Alan McPherson—the author, longtime teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a MacArthur Fellow—has died at age seventy-two. In 1978, McPherson became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his story collection Elbow Room, and in 2000, John Updike selected one of his stories for the anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century.  Since Google shut down Dennis Cooper’s blog on June 27, the question has been: Why? We may soon find out: On Facebook, the novelist says that Google has finally made contact, and that the company’s

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden. Photo: Open Road Films The Man Booker Prize longlist was announced this morning. The list includes Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, David Means’s Hystopia, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, and ten other novels. The winner will be announced on October 25th. Michelle Goldberg, the author of The Means of Production: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, traces the way irrational animosity towards Hillary Clinton has changed over the past two decades. In 1996, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote: “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the élite and the lumpen.” Back then, Goldberg writes, Clinton was seen as a

A publicity still from Jill Soloway’s “I Love Dick.” Photo: Amazon Studios. Vulture has a behind-the-scenes look at Transparent creator Jill Soloway’s new Amazon series, I Love Dick, which premieres on August 19th. Soloway has taken Chris Kraus’s 1997 cult novel and transported it to Marfa, Texas, casting Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Hahn, and Griffin Dunne as the three leads in this story of a lopsided love triangle. Soloway has high hopes for the show’s radical potential: “It’s just so powerful for a woman to say, ‘No, I’m not the object of your story,’ . . . ‘I’m the subject.’

Dennis Cooper The petition to restore novelist Dennis Cooper’s blog, which was deleted by Google without explanation, now has more than 3,000 signatures. Mark Edmund Doten, an editor at Soho Press and the author of the novel The Infernal, makes an impassioned plea at the petition’s webpage: “Google, give it back. We want all of it, the thousands of posts about art and literature, about roller coasters and defunct amusement parks, about haunted houses, optical illusions, and indie rock. We want the galleries of Halloween Masks and the tour of the Winchester Mystery House and Thomas Bernhard Day and

Mohamedou Ould Slahi Last night at the Republican National Convention, Jon Stewart took over the desk at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to deliver a Daily Show–style monologue ridiculing Donald Trump, the Republican party, and Fox News. The New York Times has a full transcript of Stewart’s remarks, which he kicked off with: “I thought Donald Trump was going to speak. Ivanka said that he was going to come out. She said he was really compassionate and generous, but then this angry groundhog came out and he just vomited on everybody for an hour.” The New Yorker has a

Jean Stein. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe On Tuesday night, Charles Kinsey became the latest victim of a police shooting—a particularly baffling case since Kinsey, an unarmed African American caretaker trying to help an autistic patient playing in the street, was lying on the ground with his hands in the air when cops shot him in the leg. Kinsey survived and told the Miami Herald that the police “realize this was something inappropriate regarding the shooting. If

JT Leroy Embattled Fox News boss Roger Ailes, accused of sexual harassment by the television host Gretchen Carlson, is negotiating his exit from the network he started twenty years ago, according to one of Ailes’s lawyers. His career there ends as Fox-style rhetoric has all but taken over the GOP. As the New York Times writes: “Mr. Trump’s convention has been a triumph for Mr. Ailes’s brand of smash-mouth and ‘politically incorrect’ politics. . . . It is, in a way, the most Fox News-y convention in the network’s history.” Ailes’s imminent departure was announced as two more women, Megyn