The Independent has a duel between two booksellers: one who works for a small shop and one who works for a superstore. Their arguments are nothing new. Service vs. Selection. Personal touch vs. Pricing. Personal v Remoteness
PublishAmerica is having a rough month... Being sued by 150 authors who felt they were deceived by the company, and taking a beating a couple of days ago at the hands of the Washington Post
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: The Least We Can Do For Fallen Victims
The Auschwitz liberation anniversary demands a new commitment to the oft-broken vow of "Never again."
The world asked itself the hardest of questions. Is humankind bound for self-destruction? Is morality helpless in the face of power? Has God turned his back? Perhaps never has the abyss of despair loomed closer than on that day 60 years ago when Soviet troops arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and found the evidence, in flesh and bone and ashes and dust, of hundreds of thousands of dead.
Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau accounted for between 1 million and 1.5 million of the more than 10 million human beings killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Many died because they were Gypsies or homosexuals or communists or otherwise deemed different and dangerous. But 6 million were Jews, and the driving force of the barbaric ideology that scourged Europe and threatened the world was the ancient lie of anti-Semitism.
• What do we mean by … The Auschwitz Evil, Within and Beyond [History defines great men when remembering great deeds and throws others into the trash heap of complacency when they stand and watch tragedy around them. The French that knowingly sent their Jews off to the Polish death camps, aware full well their fate, will surely not be remembered as heroes. History also defines the greatest of villains among the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Saddam. Defining Genocide ; Yellow-cakes, nukes, meltdowns, The China Syndrome, radiation, proliferation, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, terrorism. There are few more emotive topics in the world of politics or business than uranium. Let them eat yellowcake]
• · We say we want to be assimilated into society at large (through gay marriage), but we apparently just can't stand to be around straight people, so we have to segregate ourselves into "gay ghettos." Case in point -- Spokane, Washington. (hat tip: Kevin, a GP reader) . . . So what message are we sending to America? We want to be a part of you? Or we want to be alone and away from you nasty bigoted straight people with all your Red State cooties?" I thought it was the Republicans who wanted to put all the gays in concentration camps
• · · From time to time The Book Review has invited both new and established writers to comment on various aspects of their craft: their imaginative and autobiographical sources, their practices of composition, the origin of their sense of vocation. These essays are intended to provide a forum for writers to consider the rewards and perils of their craft. Richard Price: The Comeback Kid of American Literature. ; [Metafilter Chechs the Czechs: This confirms a theory I've long held but have never had the actual opportunity to test: People from Eastern Europe should never be naked. ; Bohemians at the Gate: Wild no more? Secrets of our sex lives laid bare ; Coffins Calendars ]
• · · · Simon Holmes a Court, the brother of Australia's most famous corporate raider, worked as a Cold War spy for South Africa's apartheid regime before his mysterious disappearance in 1977. Secret Spy ; [There are two keys to effective tax reform. Like the nuclear missile launch sequence from the days of the Cold War, they both have to be turned at exactly the same time. Cross the threshold of the Iron Curtain for taxation bliss ]
• · · · · Bruce Wagner nursed a large latte and studied The New York Times. As always, he was dressed in black, and two or three days’ dark stubble decorated his cheeks and prominent chin. His eyes, warm and brown like those of a highly intelligent dog, peered out of hefty black-framed glasses, and his partly bald, partly shaved head was the color of an old onion. Hollywood Satiricon
• · · · · · Why is it that when we change some small part of our appearance, the world treats us differently? — which is both really obvious and also kind of puzzling, because why can't the world see the part of us that's the same? Having no formal science training actually freed me up to ask the dumb questions, which are often the most important ones. Nerve has an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink