Vulture’s Kat Rosenfield reflects on The Millions, an indie book blog that was recently sold to Publishers Weekly. Although the website has no plans to change its mission or content, “there’s a consensus among readers, writers, publishers, and critics that something has ended,” Rosenfield writes. “If not the Millions itself, then perhaps the culture and era that sustained it: an online Wild West full of hungry readers and exuberant writers still young and innocent enough not to mind working for (almost) free.”
The Nieman Foundation has announced its 2019 Visiting Fellows.
BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel is joining the New York Times opinion section.
At the New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason talks to Linn Ullmann about Ingmar Bergman, anecdotes, and her new book, Unquiet. “I can’t stand anecdotes,” she said, defining them as “a story that’s good for dinner parties” (“I have thousands,” she noted). “Anecdotes . . . elicit a kind of soft response, sweet applause. An anecdote is told many times, honed in a certain way, so that, if it has a rough edge, even that is absolutely palatable. It might elicit tears, a little ‘ah.’”
“She never volunteers information. . . . She’s totally open, but you’ve got to know exactly how to ask her stuff,” Lili Anolik tells Entertainment Weekly about Eve Babitz, the subject of her new book, Hollywood’s Eve. “ When I started this book, obsession, whatever you want to call it — there was so little out there about her.” Using a borrowed copy of the underground newspaper L.A. Manifesto, Anolik began to contact people in Babitz’s social network. “I fell into rabbit hole after rabbit hole with this because everybody you met was so interesting. You’d get these little stories, these little glimpses.”