How much worse can things get for journalists?
Newspapers and magazines are closing; the ones that remain grow thinner by the week as if somehow cursed; freelance budgets are being slashed and staffers accustomed to taking it easy are being forced to write like their livelihoods depend on it. (Hint: They do.) The only Read More
New York Times writer-at-large Charles “Chip” McGrath, the 61-year-old former editor of the paper’s Sunday book review, is working on a profile of rom December 2005 and a lengthy one in New York by James Atlas that appeared in September 2006, shortly after the death of Barbara Epstein, who was Read More
Last month, the editors of The New York Times Magazine proclaimed their contributing writer Daphne Merkin “one of the most daring and ruminative writers of our time” on the table-of-contents page. Ms. Merkin’s brief essay in that week’s issue plunged into a new and scary kind of cosmetic surgery for women: “These are cruel times Read More
There’s always a bit of a mystery when a “small” book hits it big. Who knows, for example, exactly why a sappy memoir by a then demi-celeb sportswriter named Mitch Albom- Tuesdays with Morrie -became a blockbuster? Or how a quirky novel by a little-known memoirist, Alice Sebold, turned into the phenomenon The Lovely Bones Read More
When Charles (Chip) McGrath steps down this winter as editor of The New York Times Book Review in order to write for the paper full-time, whoever takes over will inherit not just a storied piece of literary real estate but a set of problems that may just be unsolvable.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of Read More
