Yesterday, Twitter accepted a bid worth about $44 billion from Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Musk intends to take the company private and plans to institute changes including loosening rules around speech on the platform, making the algorithm open source, and “authenticat[ing] all humans.” In GQ, Chris Stokel-Walker looks at what these changes could mean. At Slate, Alex Kirshner points out, “I do not think Musk thought this through. He only has stressful, annoying, and expensive paths ahead of him.”
The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced. You can watch the ceremony here.
In Gawker, B. D. McClay writes about how none of us will probably be remembered and why that’s OK: “You can climb all the way to the top of your profession only to find you’re simply standing around and that this was all you were ever trained to do. Some people will be great anyway.”
For the New Republic, Jedediah Britton-Purdy reviews Olivier Zunz’s new book about Alexis de Tocqueville, The Man Who Understood Democracy. Britton-Purdy observes, “If Tocqueville seemed picked out by fortune to see the United States whole, he also missed great swaths of what was in front of him.”
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jackson Davidow considers Nicole Rudick’s book, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle, a study of the artist in her own words.