If you’ve managed to miss the somewhat obnoxious Vice/You Tube advertisements plastered all over the city (“YOU don’t just watch the news,” apparently), then let me fill you in: Vice Media, erstwhile counterculture teen zine from Montreal, is now valued at $1.4 billionand radically expanding its international coverage. Their recent Islamic State video series quickly went viral, and no doubt there’s more where that came from. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed and Mashable are also looking to edge into the global space. Join Louise Roug (Global News Editor, Mashable), Miriam Elder (Foreign Editor, Buzzfeed), and Jason Mojica (Editor in Chief, VICE News), for a conversation chaired by Amy O’Leary of the New York Times innovation team.
talks and readings
Daphne Merkin in Conversation with Sasha Weiss
Daphne Merkin may have achortle-inducing last name, but her often painfully personal articles for publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine tended to be more mortifying than mirthful. Subjects like her battle with depression, her spanking fetish, and her years of therapy have made up a good chunk of Merkin’s oeuvre, a fact belied by her latest book, The Fame Lunches. Lunches deals in less sensational Merkin material: 45 examples of her cultural writing stretching back to the 1980s. Billed byKirkus Reviews as “Essays that go down like candy but nourish like health food,” the book has also been praised by Woody Allen for it’s “strikingly original take on the human condition.” Merkin will be in conversation with newyorker.com’s literary editor, Sasha Weiss.