Paper Trail

Elon Musk tries to buy Twitter; Jennifer Egan on her new novel


Jennifer Egan. Photo: Pieter M. Van Hattem.

Elon Musk has launched a $43-billion-dollar cash bid to buy Twitter. Bloomberg reports: “Unsatisfied with the influence that comes with being Twitter’s largest investor, he has now launched a full takeover, one of the few individuals who can afford it outright.” In The Nation, professor Victor Pickard writes about why it’s a bad idea for billionaires to have control over social-media platforms, which have become de facto public utilities.  

The BuzzFeed News union has announced that it has tentatively agreed to a contract after two years of bargaining. 

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jennifer Egan talks about her new novel, The Candy House, which revisits some of the characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad, the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  

The Story Prize has been awarded to Brandon Taylor for his collection Filthy Animals

The New York Times looks at the problems facing the newsletter company that was said to be the future of media: “Substack finds itself no longer a wunderkind but a company facing a host of challenges. Depending on whom you talk to, those challenges are either standard start-up growing pains or threats to the company’s future.”