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Profile of Daniel Dennett, “Darwinian fundamentalist” and author of a new book that argues that “religion, chiefly Christianity, is itself a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness”.
Update: Review of Dennett’s book in the New Yorker.
Norah Vincent disguised herself as a man for 18 months to see how the other half lived (and write a book about it).
Lots of chatter lately about the “broken windows” theory of why the US crime rate dropped so dramatically in the 80s and 90s. Writing in the Boston Globe, Daniel Brook explores the possible cracks in the theory, while proponents William Bratton & George Kelling defend it from “attacks” from ‘liberals”, “anti-police groups”, and “ivory-tower academics”. Gladwell says broken windows holds up, Dubner disagrees, and Gladwell rebuts.
In his new book, Twelve Books That Changed the World, Melvyn Bragg discusses, um, there’s no other way to put this, twelve (British) books that changed the world.
Collection of publicly available articles from The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005. Good reading. (thx, robin)
Shaking up tech publishing: “It seems that the industry standard [for authors] is something akin to 10% of the profits (which easily take 4-5-6 months to arrive), being forced to write in Word, and finally a production cycle that’s at least a good 3 months from final book to delivery. That’s horrible!” Building a shop “to take $19 from your credit card” and laying out books in InDesign aren’t as easy as he makes it out to be for everyone, but it’s a great overall point.
The Edge has a transcript and an mp3 recording of an event called The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On. The speakers include Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.
Top 1000 publications owned by US libraries. The Holy Bible, the 2000 US Census, and Mother Goose top the list. (via o’r)
Glenn Reynolds makes an interesting analogy about journalism and beer making in his new book:
Without formal training and using cheap equipment, almost anyone can do it. The quality may be variable, but the best home-brews are tastier than the stuff you see advertised during the Super Bowl. This is because big brewers, particularly in America, have long aimed to reach the largest market by pushing bland brands that offend no one. The rise of home-brewing, however, has forced them to create “micro-brews” that actually taste of something. In the same way, argues Mr Reynolds, bloggers—individuals who publish their thoughts on the internet—have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).
What, no “drunk on power” quip? Curiously, the Economist piece fails to mention the name of Reynolds’ book, An Army of Davids, although it appears over in the right sidebar, almost camouflaged as an ad.
Short profile of Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.
1996 NY Times review of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and a profile of Wallace from that same month by current Times food critic Frank Bruni.
List of science books up for the 2006 Aventis Prize. Need. More. Time. For. Reading.
Why do boys like girls books like Little House on the Prairie? When I was a kid, I read a lot of “girl” books (mostly my sister’s), including all the Little House books, all the Anne of Green Gables books, a few Nancy Drews, some Judy Blumes, and, uh, even the first several Babysitter’s Club books.
LibriVox provides free audiobooks of works in the public domain. Includes Robinson Crusoe, Call of the Wild, Treasure Island, and Pride and Prejudice.
The NYC Dept of Health is cracking down on the practice of sous vide (low temperature cooking of vacuum packed food for better tenderness and flavor) in the city’s restaurants. Also this tidbit: Thomas Keller is doing a sous vide cookbook…is Rulhman involved?
Gelf Magazine has an interview with the Smoking Gun’s William Bastone about their expose of James Frey.
Part 2 of the Bill Simmons/Malcolm Gladwell conversation is even better than part 1. They really rip into what Isiah Thomas has done as GM of the Knicks. “The mess [Thomas] is creating right now in New York will be studied by business school students 50 years from now alongside Enron and pets.com.”
37signals has published their latest book, Getting Real, as a PDF download that they are distributing themselves. After more than a day, they’ve sold over 1750 copies at $19 apiece:
That’s exciting. These numbers demolish the sales pace of our first book, Defensive Design for the Web, which was released through the traditional publisher/bookstore model. DIY publishing: There’s a new sheriff in town.
If you do the math, that’s ~$33,000 in sales in one day. I don’t know what the advance would be on a book like that, but they’ve got to be approaching it, and if/when they reach that figure, the profit margin on subsequent sales will be much higher than the royalties paid by a publishing company. Interesting experiment.
Meghann Marco, the woman who was upset at her publishing company for 1) not putting her book on Google Print, and 2) instead suing Google, has finally gotten her book listed on Google Print.
Short interview with David Foster Wallace in the San Antonio Current.
Pre-order Subversive Cross Stitch, the book. (via hc)
New trailer for A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel. (via rw)
If you’re running out of travel ideas, perhaps you need to read 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. (via nelson)
Book covers inspired by Rene Magritte art. (via do)
Christopher Hitchens takes Garrison Keillor to task for slamming Bernard-Henri Levy’s take on the US, American Vertigo. I’m patiently waiting for someone to take on Hitchens on Keillor on Levy on America.
Robert Birnbaum interviews physicist Lisa Randall about string theory and science popularizers.
Blockbuster films are getting more expensive and accounting for less of Hollywood’s box office take…is Hollywood’s emphasis on big movies nearing its end? I’ve always thought it was dumb that the movie industry put so many of its eggs in so few baskets. (ps. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail book is available for preorder on Amazon.)
In an age of media fragmentation, here are ten cultural events that are still shared collective experiences among US citizens, including the Super Bowl, Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code.
Regarding my question about the first superhero back in October, Peter Coogan sent word about his upcoming book, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. “An exhaustive and entertaining study of the superhero genre, this volume traces the roots of the superhero in mythology, science fiction, and the pulps, and follows the superhero’s development to its current renaissance in film, literature, and graphic novels.”
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