Longreads

LAURIE WINER on the dismantling of a once great newspaper.James OSheaThe Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers PublicAffairs Books,…

In the past weeks, the fun has leached away. Readers and viewers who know Rupert Murdoch purely as a name—or as one of those figures so wealthy, and granted such frictionless mobility by their wealth, that they never seem to be in the part of the world that you expect them to be—were startled to see a senior gent, with sparse white hair and a clownish smile, descend upon London. He was seen jogging in one of the parks, in the thrall of a personal trainer. She was blond and wholly fearsome, like someone whom Sylvester Stallone very nearly married before changing his mind and hiding under the bed. As for her trainee, he was photographed with milk-white shanks exposed unkindly to the elements. This was Rupert Murdoch? The man to whom Prime Ministers bend the knee?

This is the debut of a regular feature: a collection of the weeks best long-form journalism published in The Times, as selected by our editors. We will also include one pick from The Timess archives.…

My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?” Which indicated to me, along with a number of the other email responses I got from students, that many of them don’t even know what plagiarism is.

Why privacy mattered. "On a Sunday morning before her soccer practice, not long after my daughter's tenth birthday, she and I sat down on the couch with our tablets and I taught her to respond to lawsuits on her own. I told her to read the first message. 'It says it's in French,' she said. 'Do I translate?' 'Does it have a purple flag on it?' 'No,' she said. 'You don't actually have to worry about it unless it has a purple flag.'"

Robert Gottlieb is a man of eclectic tastes, and it is difficult to make generalizations about the authors he has worked with or the hundreds of books he has edited. In his years at Simon …