paper trail

Aug 16, 2012 @ 12:54:00 am

New Yorkers: Come support the Russian punk band Pussy Riot by attending an event at the Ace Hotel in which Chloe Sevigny, Eileen Myles, Bookforum contributor Johanna Fateman and Mx Justin Vivian Bond read the band members’ courtroom statements. The three members of Pussy Riot were arrested in February on charges of “hooliganism” (which could land them up to seven years in prison) and have been held in custody ever since. Their sentence will be handed down on Friday.

While the scenario is ripe for wordplay, the competitive Scrabble community found nothing funny about the scandal that erupted at the annual Scrabble Nationals this week when a highly ranked, 13-year-old player was found to be cheating.

Jonah Lehrer may have resigned from the New Yorker over the plagiarism scandal involving his latest book, but he’s still got one job at Conde Nast. Buzzfeed reports that Lehrer is keeping his post as a features writer at Wired, and moreover, that the magazine has been retroactively fact-checking all of Lehrer’s old stories, and haven’t yet found any problems.

In an elegant and sharply funny essay that picks up on Jacob Silverman’s recent Slate piece about the epidemic of “niceness” in book reviewing culture, New York Times Book Review-er Dwight Garner makes a case for critics who are actually critical.

Nate DiMeo, the ghostwriter for a fictitious book about Pawnee, Indiana (the setting for the TV show “Parks and Recreation”) is up against New Yorker humorists Patricia Marx and Calvin Trillin for this year’s annual Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Black bears, alligators, and NASA mars rovers—four days’ worth of material from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s diary.

Before he became known as a novelist, Oscar Wilde was an editor at Woman’s World—the 19th century equivalent of Vogue. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaya Genç trawls the magazine’s archives for connections between Wilde’s writing and his work as an editor. It might be telling that Wilde wasn’t adverse to the occasional stunt: he once asked Queen Victoria to contribute a poem.

Flavorwire unveils their Fall 2012 books preview, featuring new works by Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie, Junot Diaz, and Chris Ware. Look out for reviews of new titles by Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace (which both made the list) in our forthcoming fall issue.