Archives for July 2017

Peter Lattman, a managing director of media at Emerson Collective and a former media editor and deputy business editor at The New York Times, will become vice chairman of The Atlantic.

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Mr. Bradley said he started thinking about The Atlantic’s path forward two years ago. With the help of “a small group of researchers,” he said, he began last year to identify potential owners for the company. That list included Ms. Powell Jobs, who is the widow of Steven P. Jobs, a co-founder of Apple; she first expressed interest in the company at a meeting in January in Washington.

“What a privilege it is to partner with David Bradley and become a steward of The Atlantic, one of the country’s most important and enduring journalistic institutions,” Ms. Powell Jobs said in a news release. She added: “Emerson Collective is excited to work with David, with his first-rate leadership team, and with his enormously talented staff, to ensure that The Atlantic continues to fulfill its critical mission at this critical time.”

Emerson Collective’s deal for a majority stake in The Atlantic is expected to close in about a month.

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The deal comes at something of a moment for The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857. The magazine has enjoyed strong digital growth, and 80 percent of its revenue now comes from nonprint sources, including digital ads and events. Like many other publications, it has capitalized on the current political environment: TheAtlantic.com’s audience grew 36 percent in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2016.

By acquiring a majority stake in The Atlantic, Emerson Collective — which focuses on education, the environment, immigration, and social justice issues — expands its portfolio of media and entertainment investments. It is an investor in Axios, a media company started by the Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei and its former star reporter, Mike Allen, and in Pop-Up Magazine. Last year, it took a minority stake in Anonymous Content, the production and talent management company behind the movie “Spotlight.”

The organization also helps support several nonprofit journalism organizations, including the Marshall Project, Mother Jones and ProPublica.

For The Atlantic, the deal represents something of a return to its roots: Ralph Waldo Emerson, after whom Emerson Collective is named, was one of the magazine’s founders.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/business/media/atlantic-media-emerson-collective-majority-stake.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Paul Rabil, among the most recognized lacrosse players in the world, plays for the New York Lizards of Major League Lacrosse. Mr. Rabil, 31, is also a tech-savvy, sports-media entrepreneur and the chairman of his namesake foundation, which aims to assist students with learning differences. Most Sundays during the lacrosse season, which lasts from June through August, Mr. Rabil stays close to his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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INTENTIONS I try to read a while every morning, first thing. I read a lot of personal growth books and business books. I’m currently reading “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy,” by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. It’s incredible. After reading, I meditate, to set my intentions for the day. After that, I’ll do my “morning pages,” a practice I learned from business and personal growth guru Tim Ferriss, which is basically releasing your thoughts from the prior night, a technique that allows me to let go: to see those thoughts, write them down and move on. I’m constantly striving to be present, so overly thinking about a win or a loss or the week’s travel schedule or stuff like that can really bog me down, so I have a pretty thorough morning journal to help me focus on the day ahead and that day alone.

BIG BREAKFAST Sunday mornings are tough during the season because you have a late Saturday night game, so — after my regular routine — I’ll take care of any kinks or bruises that I picked up the night before. I’ll stretch for a while and go into a hot tub. Then I set some time to dig in and make a nice breakfast. I’ll make six to eight eggs, sauté kale or spinach, two to three strips of bacon, some mushrooms and roasted sweet potatoes. It’s a really big breakfast on Sunday. I wash it down with a ton of water.

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WALK AND TALK I’m trying to invest more in my tribe of close friends to find that more balanced life, so Sundays are a good time to set that intention because every other day of the week is so busy. A regular example might be getting together with a friend for a walk. I like to go to areas of the city that I haven’t discovered yet or even just take a big lap around Williamsburg to check out thrift stores and pop-up shops. The topics of conversation can be sports or business or life. Personal growth is an area I like to spend time talking about with friends that I trust.

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STILL LIFE One kick I’ve been on lately is exploring my artistic roots in drawing and painting, either outside or in my apartment, depending on the weather. I mostly use acrylics on canvas and paint whatever I see that comes as inspiration. This sounds horrible, but I just did a latte! I know. I know. But it just occurred to me to paint it, so I did. But it could be other things, too: buildings, plants, cityscapes, trees. Not just lattes. I swear.

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WORK SPACE Sunday is the best day to get things done since there’s no games or practice, no business commitments or appearances. I’ll set up in the shared work space in our building. I get ahead with some preparation for the upcoming week’s agenda: interviews and appearances and content creation, work for the foundation. All of it scheduled around practice and games, of course. And I also catch up on things still left from the previous week. Finally, I give one last edit to all the content that is set to be released in the upcoming week: Podcast, YouTube video, newsletter. This last look helps me sleep later that night.

TABLE FOR ONE I’m of Lebanese descent, so I eat Mediterranean several times a week, certainly on Sundays for dinner. Cafe Mogador is right down the street. I like to take a number of dishes, so I’ll usually go kibbe, grape leaves, falafel, fataya. I’ll have a glass of red wine with it. I like to eat by myself. I bring a notebook to collect my thoughts or look through previous notes; it’s a good time to reflect. No dessert.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/nyregion/paul-rabil-lacrosse-sunday-routine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Ms. Kakutani started her career covering cultural news at The Times in 1979 and became a book critic in 1983. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1998.

“No one has played a larger role in guiding readers through the country’s literary life over the past four decades than Michi,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, wrote in a note to employees announcing her retirement on Thursday. “And no one, I would venture, knows more about the literature and writing that flowed out of Sept. 11.”

He added, “No one could be as well-read as Michi.”

On Twitter, Ms. Kakutani expressed gratitude to The Times and said she intended to “focus on longer pieces about politics and culture.”

Over her 38-year career at The Times, she offered critical assessments of virtually every major author working during that time, but she also broke news. In 2015, her review of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” was the first to tell readers that the beloved character Atticus Finch, the progressive hero of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” harbored racist views. And in his waning days in the Oval Office, Barack Obama sat down with Ms. Kakutani to discuss the role books had played for him during his presidency and his life.

Her career was not without controversy. In 2007, she wrote a review of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the last installment in Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, that The Times published before the book went on sale, earning criticism.

Ms. Kakutani also used fiction and nonfiction as a lens to analyze politics and political figures. Her review in September of a biography of Adolf Hitler, Volker Ullrich’s “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939,” was widely read as a critique of Donald J. Trump.

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“What everyone loved was that she took it so seriously, so personally, that she would argue with writers and get mad at them when she felt they were not doing their best work,” said Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette Book Group. “There aren’t many critical voices like that, where you see someone, over a long period of time, responding to a writer book by book and to an entire body of work.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/business/media/michiko-kakutani-times-book-critic-steps-down.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced its 2017 longlist on Wednesday, featuring 13 works by a variety of literary heavyweights.

Arundhati Roy, who won the prize for her debut novel “The God of Small Things,” was longlisted for her second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” 20 years later.

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Another notable work that made the longlist was Colson Whitehead’s critically acclaimed novel “The Underground Railroad” — which already won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

“The longlist showcases a diverse spectrum — not only of voices and literary styles but of protagonists, too, in their culture, age and gender,” Lola Young, chairwoman of the 2017 judging panel, said in a statement. “Nevertheless we found there was a spirit common to all these novels: though their subject matter might be turbulent, their power and range were life-affirming — a tonic for our times.”

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is open to writers of any nationality who write in English and are published in Britain. American authors became eligible for the first time in 2014, and Paul Beatty was the first American to win, in 2016. Four Americans made this year’s longlist — Mr. Whitehead; Paul Auster for “4 3 2 1”; George Saunders for his first full-length novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo”; and Emily Fridlund for “History of Wolves.”

The judges will pare down the longlist to a shortlist of six, which will be announced in September. The winner of the prize — a hefty 50,000 pounds (or about $65,350) — will be announced on Oct. 17, at a black-tie dinner in London.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/books/man-booker-prize-2017-longlist.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hillary Rodham Clinton hasn’t shied away from the public stage in the months since her defeat in the 2016 election. She’s been giving speeches, sitting on panels, going to the theater, and taking selfies with supporters, and this fall, she’ll be publishing a book that promises to be “her most personal memoir yet,” according to her publisher, Simon Schuster.

The book, titled “What Happened,” will offer an intimate view of what it was like for Mrs. Clinton to run as the first female presidential candidate from a major party in United States history, in an often vicious and turbulent campaign.

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Ms. Clinton will explore the mistakes she made, what it was like to run against Donald J. Trump, the difficulties she has faced as a woman in politics, the role that Russian hacking played in the election, and how she recovered from the humiliating loss, according to a description of the book released by Simon Schuster.

Most of all, though, the book will give insight into what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most dramatic campaigns in modern American history.

“In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net,” Mrs. Clinton writes in the book’s introduction. “Now I’m letting my guard down.”

“What Happened” is due out on Sept. 12.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/books/hillary-clinton-memoir-what-happened.html?partner=rss&emc=rss