Lawsuits, interviews and another publication's demise

• A Turkish judge has dropped charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk caused a ruckus a while back by classifying the wholesale slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, as well as of Kurds in the 1980s, as genocide, an opinion that the Turkish public was apparently not ready to accept. The charge against Pamuk was that he “insulted Turkish identity.” It’s a good thing the judge found a handy legal loophole to use as an escape chute; it saved the government from having to address the fact that they’re trying to suppress alternative viewpoints.

• Donald Trump is suing New York Times business reporter Timothy O’Brien.

O’Brien, as well as Time Warner Book Group and Warner Books, have the lawyer-hounds at their heels because O’Brien’s new book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, quotes anonymous sources that allege Trump isn’t nearly as wealthy as he says he is. I got five bucks saying they’ll call each other names and point fingers and eventually settle out of court for some absurd undisclosed amount.

• Video: Bill Maher interviews Stephen King at Amazon.com.

For a strange new experience, watch Bill Maher interview Stephen King via Amazon’s new online video program, Amazon Fishbowl (a.k.a., “All We Really Want Is To Be The Home Shopping Network”). The interview starts out with the usual softball questions, but quickly gets interesting once Maher brings up James Frey and lets King, a former user/abuser himself, express his total lack of surprise that a drug addict might make a few things up. It’s too bad they both look like corporate shills in the process.

• Charles McGrath details the closing of The New Leader in the New York Times.

Another one bites the dust:

Over the years The New Leader attracted a band of loyal contributors who amounted to a not-so-short list of everyone who was anyone in liberal intellectual circles: George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Willy Brandt, Albert Murray, Hubert H. Humphrey, Theodore Draper, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, Murray Kempton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Hans J. Morgenthau, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to name just a few. All of them wrote for nothing, or in recent years for what Mr. Kolatch calls a "tangible token" of $100 or so. The sociologist Daniel Bell, whose connection to the magazine is perhaps the longest of anyone's, dating back to when he was a student at City College in the late 30's, said recently, "When you think about it, it's remarkable that The New Leader was able to sustain itself for so long."