Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne have bought Time magazine. Columbia Journalism Review notes that the Benioffs are “the latest tech entrepreneurs to join a club of billionaire media moguls.” Folio reports that the new owners don’t plan to involve themselves in the magazine’s daily operations. Benioff himself tells the Times that Time will stay in New York. “I’m busy enough with my job. They have a great team. It’s a very strong business,” he explained in a text message.
Haruki Murakami has withdrawn himself from consideration for the New Academy Prize. The award was conceived as an alternative to the Nobel Prize, which is on hiatus this year after sexual assault allegations were made against members of the Swedish Academy. Murakami was among four finalists who were notified by the prize organizers, but said that he prefered “to concentrate on his writing, away from media attention.” The other three finalists are Neil Gaiman, Maryse Condé, and Kim Thúy.
Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power have won the fiction and nonfiction Dayton Literary Peace Prizes.
The New York Times talks to historian Jill Lepore about growing up in Boston, women in politics, and her new book, These Truths.
Amy Chozick’s memoir Chasing Hillary is being turned into a TV series by Warner Bros.
New York Media is rethinking its books coverage. Nieman Lab writes that rather than a separate vertical website section for books, they will now be thought of as a “horizontal” section and covered throughout the company’s media properties.
French Exit author Patrick deWitt talks toThe Guardian about wealth, family, and ghosts. DeWitt says that his belief in the occult drives his writing. “I think there are all sorts of things that go on behind the scenes that we can’t necessarily define or put words to,” he said. “To me, these are frightening elements and I don’t necessarily like to address them in my daily life, but my desire to write about them in fiction is apparently overwhelming. I keep doing it over and over again.”
