paper trail

More medals for writers

Jhumpa Lahiri

Several writers are to be awarded the National Humanities Medal, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Larry McMurtry, and Annie Dillard.

You’d think the Daily Mail would have grown a thicker skin by now, but in fact, DailyMail.com is suing Gawker for publishing some mean things about its editorial model (in the words of James King, a former freelance news writer for them, it involves “little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication”).

And still they come: More digital journalists announce their intention to unionize, this time at Al Jazeera America. Complaining in a statement of “a troubling lack of transparency, inconsistent management and lack of clear redress” (some of which we’ve heard about before) the staff wrote: “We who are tasked with communicating the voice of the voiceless must retain a voice ourselves. . . . We call upon Al Jazeera's leaders to uphold its mission, not just to its audience but also to its employees.”

More tidbits are being found among the Hillary Clinton e-mails released by the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act—Sidney Blumenthal sent Clinton a link to a piece about Israel in the (old) New Republic, identifying it as propaganda, “the fully articulated view of the Netanyahu government and Likud about ‘the crisis’.”

Two Vice News journalists have been released from a Turkish jail after they were charged last week in the course of their reporting with “aiding a terrorist organisation.” A third, Mohammed Ismael Rasool, is still in custody.

The actor Jesse Eisenberg, author of a new story collection, answers some questions about his reading. He says he’d like to join “a book club run by the C.S.I. unit, where they come to the house and dust the pages for fingerprints, or the secret police, where they drill a hole in the wall to make sure I’m reading.”