In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that Gawker’s editorial employees have voted to unionize—joining the Writers Guild of America, East—a Politico staffer has asked his colleagues to redouble their efforts to unionize as well. As Erik Wemple pointed out on his blog earlier this year, it may be a tough sell.
Ali Smith has been awarded the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel How to Be Both.
At Vanity Fair, a profile of power couple Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge includes new details about the mass exodus at the New Republic a few years after Hughes took charge.
The Paris Review has made their Spring issue’s interviews—with Hilary Mantel, Lydia Davis, and Elena Ferrante—free online. The reclusive Ferrante granted the Review her first in-person interview (she writes under a pseudonym and makes no public appearances), and tells the magazine that her reasons for avoiding the public eye have changed since she first made the decision in the early ’90s: “Back then, I was frightened at the thought of having to come out of my shell. Timidity prevailed. Later, I came to feel hostility toward the media, which doesn’t pay attention to books themselves and values a work according to the author’s reputation.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard appeared on Charlie Rose for an in-depth interview, which turned out to be a bit of a struggle between the two men as they tried to understand each other. At one point, a pretty exasperated Rose asks Knausgaard if he is happy now, to which the author replies: “I’m really not looking for happiness . . . occasionally I am happy.”
