Gawker Media is preparing for its legal battle with Hulk Hogan, who is asking that the media company give him $100 million for posting a sex-tape featuring the legendary wrestler. The trial begins on July 6 in Florida, and pivots on Gawker’s argument that the tape was “newsworthy.” Most legal experts expect Gawker to win, but the fact that the trial is taking place in Hogan’s hometown could affect the results. As Fortune points out: “The case is important not only because Hogan wants $100 million, which could ruin Gawker, but also because it highlights how Gawker is alone among new media companies in waging the sort of public interest legal fights that were once second nature for traditional media.” Nick Denton, the founder and chief executive of Gawker, writes: “I should make it clear: we would have settled too, in the interest of fighting another day, if Hogan’s demands were reasonable and the story flawed in any way. But now that the trial is on, we intend to fight it as far as we need to and we can.”
Kelly Marcel, who wrote the screenplay for Fifty Shades of Grey, says she is so “heartbroken” by the studio’s changes to her script that she won’t watch the movie.
In a New Statesman feature titled “What Can’t You Say?,” guest editors Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman asked artists and other public figures to reveal the thoughts they normally leave unspoken. Writers including Roxane Gay, Alina Simone, Geeta Dayal, Suki Kim, and Elif Shafak are among those who responded.
At Fusion, Felix Salmon argues that “the New York Times should buy Bloomberg.” “This seems, on its face, to be insane,” Salmon writes. “After all, Bloomberg LP is worth somewhere in the region of $40 billion; the New York Times Company is worth about $2 billion. (That’s so small that it will easily pass any anti-trust concerns.) How can something so small buy something so big? Easy: the New York Times Company would simply issue new shares of stock.”
“In ninth grade English Mrs X required us to memorise and recite a poem and so I asked the Topeka High librarian to direct me to the shortest poem she knew.” Ben Lerner, author of the novel 10:04 and the poetry collection Mean Free Path, has an excellent Diary about poetry (and why some people hate it) at the London Review of Books.
At the Paris Review, critic and fiction writer Damion Searls details the challenges and pleasures of translating Norwegian author Jon Fosse into English.