Moby response the piece: “It’s a well-known fact that outrageous confessionals—the kind that populate xoJane’s section, It Happened to Me—garner traffic. Outrage, disgust and anger are the stuff of going viral (a phrase that conjures up disease as much as anything else). Yet xoJane seems to consistently cross an unspoken line, confusing any woman’s opinion as one inherently worth publishing, no matter the opinion, or its costs.” xoJane recently removed the post, replacing it with an apology by editor Jane Pratt. An issue of The Black Panther written by Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best-selling comic of the year so

James Hannaham The much anticipated heart-to-heart between Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and some wary Republicans seems to have gone beautifully: the New York Times, paraphrasing some of those in attendance, described it as “mostly collegial, sympathetic and inquisitive.” Zuckerberg himself confirmed his free-to-be-you-and-me stance directly after the meeting: “Our community’s success depends on everyone feeling comfortable sharing anything they want.” For his part, Glenn Beck was impressed by Zuckerberg’s “manner, his ability to manage the room, his thoughtfulness, his directness, and what seemed to be his earnest desire to ‘connect the world.’” Beck saved his opprobrium for the other

Rivka Galchen Elizabeth Spayd, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, will soon replace the intrepid Margaret Sullivan as the New York Times’s public editor. As Jeff Bezos confirms his intention to build more physical Amazon bookstores, the writer Sarah Boxer, in The Atlantic, makes an oddly convincing case for reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu on a cellphone (in her case, the HTC Incredible, whose screen is “about two by three inches”): “Your cellphone screen is like a tiny glass-bottomed boat moving slowly over a vast and glowing ocean of words in the night. There

Elissa Schappell After more than twenty years as Vanity Fair’s “Hot Type” columnist, Elissa Schappell has announced on Facebook that she is bidding the magazine “a fond farewell.” Schappell, whose books include the story collection Blueprints for Building Better Girls, plans to devote more time to her own writing. Restless former New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones has left his latest gig at the Los Angeles Times after less than a year. Brian Evenson has an eerie new piece up on People Holding (which publishes short fiction prompted by found photographs of people holding things): “No matter which way

Han Kang The Intercept announced yesterday that it would begin publishing large chunks of the material provided to it by Edward Snowden, and that it would collaborate with outside journalists to explore and report on the rest of the archive. The documents they’re releasing include a trove of internal NSA newsletters from 2003 onward, which have already yielded insight into the agency’s involvement in interrogations at Guantánamo and in Iraq, and which are also fascinating simply for their tone. The Man Booker International prize was awarded to Han Kang (and translator Deborah Smith) for her novel The Vegetarian. Despite

Max Porter Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is convening a meeting of conservative media figures this week to address recent stories that the social media site has suppressed right-wing news sources from its “Trending Topics” section. Glenn Beck, one of the invitees, phrased his concerns with typical acumen: “If

Katherine Dunn Next Friday at Greenlight Books, New Directions will celebrate its eightieth birthday with a party featuring not just champagne but also readings by an amazing group of authors: Anne Carson, László Krasznahorkai, Rivka Galchen, Forrest Gander, John Keene, Bernadette Mayer, and Eliot Weinberger. Timothy L. O’Brien—a journalist who edited a Pulitzer-winning series about war veterans—was sued by Donald Trump for libel following the publication of O’Brien’s book TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald. Before the suit was dismissed, O’Brien and his legal team were allowed to see Trump’s tax returns. A court order stops him from saying

Jenny Diski Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, has published a remembrance of her friend, the writer Jenny Diski, whose “cancer diary” first appeared in instalments in the LRB (“So—we’d better get cooking the meth,” Diski told her partner, Ian Patterson, known to her readers as the Poet, after her diagnosis). The two friends were alike “in the things we found funny and the value we attached to that; and in the words we used and how our sentences ran.” Diski, Wilmers writes, “said she didn’t do narrative, and that also seems true: she didn’t have

Olivier Bourdeaut The controversy over Facebook’s “Trending Topics” feature continues: After a former Facebook staffer claimed that the site routinely suppresses stories from conservative news outlets, a GOP senator on the commerce committee has written to Mark Zuckerberg requesting a hearing on the matter. Facebook has said it will address the committee’s questions and will continue to investigate “whether any violations took place.”  Prince provides the soundtrack to the dance scene in Kevin Young’s new poem “Little Red Corvette.” falls apart under scrutiny.” At the Washington Post, Erik Wemple wonders “why the White House did such extensive business with

Joan Didion Farrar, Straus, and Giroux has announced that Sean McDonald, a senior editor at the publisher, will become the editor in chief of a new imprint called MCD/FSG. According to FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi, the new imprint will aim “to create a space to publish work and experiment with publishing styles, forms, and genres that are at the edges of FSG’s traditions.” Former Amazon staffer Daphne Durham will be the executive editor. At the Believer Logger, Maggie Nelson discusses buddhism, memoir, autotheory, and the self-exposure of her work: “When people say things to me like, ‘What does it

Karl Ove Knausgaard on Rotten Tomatoes.” In Men’s Journal, Karl Ove Knausgaard tells an interviewer about one of his favorite contemporary writers: “I was reading Maggie Nelson when you came, and I just bought four books by her before we met. She’s so much better than anything I’ve read for a long, long time.” Greg Milner, the author of 2009’s Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, is back with a new book, Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds. The book cites recent breakthroughs in neuroscience suggesting that our brains come equipped with

Ta-Nehisi Coates Random House imprint One World has announced that it will release two new books—one fiction, and one nonfiction—by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Daniel Harris—whose books include The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture and Cute, Quaint, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism—has outraged many readers with his essay “The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate,” published in the Winter issue of the Antioch Review. “While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition and to do so without fear of reprisal,” Harris writes, “I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion.” Yesterday, Antioch College, where

Yuri Herrera Jeff Sharlet, the author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy and Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between, has been covering right-wing movements in the US for years, so he knows what he’s talking about when he writes, of Donald Trump’s rise to become the Republican candidate, that “this is so much worse than most people understand.” In an article for Esquire, he gives thirteen reasons that most people are “underestimating the problem.” The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards have been announced. Mexican author Yuri Herrera’s

Adam Haslett In its most recent quarterly report, the New York Times announced that it now has 1.4 million digital-only subscribers. The paper has gained 67,000 digital subscribers since the beginning of 2016. We were deeply entertained by the breadth of the index of cultural critic Chuck Klosterman’s forthcoming book, What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, which will be published in June. Skimming the A and B entries, we found: ABBA, AC/DC, Renata Adler, Aristotle, Jane Austen, Ballers, Baudrillard, the Bee Gees, blogging, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Budweiser.  TOR Publishing has announced

Roxane Gay Gawker’s tax returns for 2011 through 2013 were recently unsealed as part of Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the company, in which a Florida court awarded Hogan $140 million. Tax records show that the company’s largest expense has been employee salaries. But another expense—fees sent to Gawker’s sister company in Hungary—have led Hogan’s lawyers to suggest that the company is “hiding money overseas.” Meanwhile, Hogan is suing Gawker again—not, this time, for releasing one of his private sex tapes, but for “allegedly leaking sealed court documents to the National Enquirer that quoted him making racist remarks.” Roxane

Dana Spiotta Former Grantland writer Jonathan Abrams—whose books include Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution—has announced that he is at work on an oral history of the TV show The Wire. Don DeLillo, whose Zero K was published last week, granted a rare interview to Los Angeles Times writer Carolyn Kellogg. “I’m not sure how a sentence or a paragraph extends itself,” he says of his writing. “I can’t say it’s automatic, but it all seems to happen in a kind of intuitive way.” If you’re in New York, you

Claudia Rankine The New York Times and its CEO Mark Thompson have been hit with a class-action lawsuit that alleges “deplorable discrimination” in matters of hiring and pay. Claiming that “not only does the Times have an ideal customer (young, white, wealthy), but also an ideal staffer (young, white, unencumbered with a family),” the suit takes particular aim at Thompson, who while head of the BBC was also forced to address concerns about the treatment of older women, and who is accused of bringing “his misogynistic and ageist attitudes across the Atlantic to New York City.” The poet Claudia

Jenny Diski Writer Jenny Diski died this morning at the age of sixty-eight. She was the author of numerous books, including Skating to Antarctica: A Journey to the End of the World, The Sixties, and What I Don’t Know about Animals. Her book In Gratitude is scheduled for release later this month. Diski had been writing a cancer diary for the London Review of Books since 2014, when she learned of her diagnosis. The LRB has made all of her work for the magazine—more than two-hundred articles dating back to 1992—freely available. As Giles Harvey writes in his moving profile of Diski from

Rebecca Traister Paramount Television has purchased the rights to adapt Rebecca Traister’s book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, which was published in March by Simon  Schuster. Traister will be the TV series’s executive producer. Longreads has posted an interview with Jillian Keenan, whose new book, Sex with Shakespeare, combines meditations on her love of the Bard with memoiristic passages about the fetish community and her penchant for spanking. The New Republic has named Eric Bates as the editor who will “lead the day-to-day editorial operations across the magazine, our website and

Harper Lee Gannett, the conglomerate that owns USA Today and many other media companies, has submitted a bid for $815 million to buy Tribune Publishing, which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and nine other daily papers. According to the New York Times, Tribune has been “shy” and “coy” in its response to the bid. As Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, “Instead of Tribune’s board popping champagne corks and shouting Hallelujah, it told Gannett, astonishingly, in effect: ‘Wait. We’re not sure we want to do that and, actually, we’re not sure we even want to talk to you about