CNN’s hiring of ex-Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has already proven to be a gigantic mess. Journalists—including, reportedly, those within CNN—have objected to the network paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a man who has personally threatened people who are now his colleagues, but CNN has…
As the profession of journalism slowly dies, what is sprouting up in its wake are “content creators”—people who replicate the facade of journalism while skipping most of the hard stuff. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the growing swath of people who review art and entertainment on YouTube, healdined by…
Slate’s Daniel Engber finds evidence that disgraced fabulist and self-plagiarist Jonah Lehrer re-used several passages from his 2009 book How We Decide, which has since been retracted, in his new pop-psychology tome A Book About Love.
Today the New York Observer published an “open letter” to the newspaper’s owner, Jared Kushner, in which a reporter named Dana Schwartz asks her boss to reconsider his close relationship with his father-in-law, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who recently tweeted (and later deleted) an anti-Semitic…
Remember Jonah Lehrer, the pop-psychology author and New Yorker staff writer who invented Bob Dylan quotes and somehow managed to plagiarize himself? After resigning from his magazine gig in mid-2012, and watching his publisher retract two of his three books, Lehrer laid low for a few years—but not so low as to…
Well-known suit-wearer Gay Talese is scheduled to release a book in two weeks. The book is about a man, Gerald Foos, who says he purchased and maintained a motel in Colorado for several decades specifically for the purpose of spying on his customers as they did such private activities as having sex and using the…
The Voyeur’s Motel, Gay Talese’s book-length profile of alleged peeping tom and hotelier Gerald Foos, comes out in less than two weeks, but according to The Washington Post, Talese has “disavowed” the book after being confronted with new doubts about the truthfulness of its subject.
This morning, esteemed bus terminal periodical USA Today reported stunning news: Author Cormac McCarthy had died suddenly at the age of 82. The news was posted to the paper’s Twitter account in a tweet that has since been deleted because Cormac McCarthy is not actually dead—he was only pronounced so by an Italian…
David Brooks, the Mr. Rogers of the New York Times, has some penetrating thoughts about the “working-class parts of America,” on which he is a well-known expert.
On Friday, Page Six reported that CNN staffers were “pissed” and felt “betrayed” after the network’s president, Jeff Zucker, hired Donald Trump’s physically combative former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as an exclusive contributor to CNN programming. Citing what appear to be at least three sources (including…
Last year, a man named Bayna El-Amin smashed a chair over the head of another man named Jonathan Snipes at a Chelsea Dallas BBQ. Snipes, who is gay, initially portrayed the attack to DNAInfo as bias-related and unprovoked. Because El-Amin fled the scene and wasn’t arrested until over a month later, the public didn’t…
Despite being fired in shame by Donald Trump’s enormous adult sons, Corey Lewandowski will not be exiting your life any time soon. This afternoon, CNN announced that it has hired Trump’s ex-campaign manager as a political commentator. Per Politico, the position is salaried and will make Lewandowski exclusive to CNN.
Last night, the New York Times reported on Iowa Congressman Steve King’s attempt to block the Obama administration from changing the face of the $20 bill from Andrew Jackson to the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman. At first glance, the piece reads as straightforward, workaday journalism. On closer inspection,…
Gawker Media has filed for bankruptcy. The specific circumstances leading to that bankruptcy are unique and bizarre. The fact of a media company declaring itself bankrupt, however, is pretty much a commonplace. Under other conditions—even facing down a different, more conventionally motivated lawsuit—Gawker’s…
Peggy Noonan, a keen scientist of the political sphere, once predicted Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama based on the fact that she saw a bunch of his yard signs. She brings the same eye for meaningless detail to the shores of Olde Englande.
Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of filing for bankruptcy is the well-meaning condolence note from a friend. “I’m so sorry,” more than one has written. That sympathy is often followed by fear for what Facebook director Peter Thiel’s revenge campaign—a billionaire secretly funding lawsuits against publishers,…
We in the journalism field suffer the daily indignities of a dying industry, so sometimes our bosses try and cheer us up, usually with room temperature pizza sitting in clotted pools of grease. Bad pizza is better than some alternatives, though, such as the cake recently served to some staffers of The Oregonian which…
One day after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal attack on Gawker Media to the New York Times, Gawker reporter Ashley Feinberg published a lengthy investigation that sought to solve the enduring mystery of Donald Trump’s infamous mane, which she described as a “cotton candy…
Donald Trump today briefly used his Twitter account to do something other than troll the American public—he started tweeting like some kind of reporter.
This morning, we received the rarest of gifts: a genuinely candid interview with a celebrity. Noah Galvin, the 22-year-old star of the ABC sitcom The Real O’Neals, spoke with E. Alex Jung of New York’s entertainment vertical Vulture about being a young, out gay actor in Hollywood. The story was headlined “Noah Galvin…
