Booker Prize Panel Is Said to Consider Allowing Americans to Be Eligible

For more than four decades, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction has been a uniquely British award, seeking to identify the best novel by authors from Ireland and the Commonwealth.

Now that distinction may end. The prize committee will break with tradition and allow American authors to be eligible, beginning next year, The Sunday Times in London reported. It will include Americans because the Booker committee “believes U.S. writers must be allowed to compete to ensure the award’s global reputation,” The Times said.

Amy Barder, a spokeswoman for organization, said in an e-mail that the committee planned to announce changes to the rules of the prize on Wednesday, but declined to confirm The Times’s report. “The information which is currently in circulation is incomplete,” Ms. Barder said.

The winner of this year’s Booker will be announced at a ceremony in London on Oct. 15.

Robert Gates to Write ‘Duty,’ About His Time as Defense Secretary

Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary under President George W. Bush and President Obama, will tell the story of his tenure in those administrations in a new memoir, his publisher said on Monday.

“Duty,” to be released by Knopf, chronicles Mr. Gates’s nearly five years managing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his “political war with Congress” every day he was in office, Mr. Gates said in a statement.

The book is also about “the dramatic contrast between my public respect, bipartisanship and calm, and my private frustration, disgust and anger,” said Mr. Gates, who left the Obama administration in 2011.

Knopf said it would release the book in January 2014.

AMC Announces a Companion Series to ‘Walking Dead’

David R. Lutman for The New York Times

Robert Kirkman in 2008 at his home in Richmond, Ky., holds some of his comic books, which became the basis of "The Walking Dead" on AMC. He will be creating a companion series for the network.

AMC wants more “Dead” and who could be surprised?

“The Walking Dead,” the top show in television among the advertiser-preferred group of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 is going to get what AMC is calling a “companion series,” with an expected airdate sometime in 2015.

The network announced on Monday that Robert Kirkman, who wrote the comic book series that inspired the television show, will develop the new version, which is still untitled. It will, fans will be happy to note, feature zombies.

In a statement, Mr. Kirkman said, “The opportunity to make a show that isn’t tethered by the events of the comic book, and is truly a blank page, has set my creativity racing.”

Other members of the “Walking Dead” creative team, including the producers Gale Anne Hurd and David Alpert, will be involved in the new effort as well.

It was the second time this month that AMC announced new shows developed from the roots of its current hits. Last week, the network announced that it had ordered “Better Call Saul,” a spinoff of “Breaking Bad.”

Chipotle Returns to Animation to Support Sustainable Farming

Two years after Chipotle Mexican Grill introduced to widespread acclaim an animated commercial with a pointed message about sustainable farming, the company is back with another animated spot on the subject of food production.

The new commercial, called “The Scarecrow," has already amassed more than four million views on YouTube since it was uploaded last week. The commercial takes swipes at giant companies that treat food like another product to process and contrasts that with food made in sustainable ways that is fresh and wholesome.