Bulletin Board
- The Digital Public Library of America opens Thursday
- National Library Week starts tomorrow so make it a point next week to thank library workers
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- The white man Jesus (“Questions of race and identity have now become inescapable elements of any public presentation of the Bible.”)
- Are we ready to stop pretending we all enjoy ‘Mad Men’ yet? (“‘Mad Men’ is the flagship of the new Intellectual Vegetable Television complex, the kind of meticulously crafted TV that the formerly bookish spend their intellectual leisure taking in.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Lawsuit of the Week
- A man who had his genitals cut off so he could be a woman, then had second thoughts and wanted to be a man again, sued Michigan for refusing to issue him a third birth certificate, recertifying him as a man.
Legislative Time-Wasters of the Week
- Oregon and Hawaii considering legislation to name official state microbes
Bookish Linkage
- I agree wholeheartedly with Melville House that it’s really sad that there are only five authors left in America
- Kafka before his name became an adjective
- I suppose it makes sense that the organization giving a new UK award for radical fiction for children is called the Alliance of Radical Bookstores (via)
- To Kill a Mockingbird rather handily won a Publishers Weekly online poll for “The Great American Novel“
- Twenty-one 21st Century novels every man should read — and I’ve actually read 10 of them (via)
- The fiction finalists for the 2013 Best Translated Book Awards were announced. I’ve read one but I punted on another one last month.
- That book did not, however, make the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, where I’ve read one of the six. Interestingly no book made both this list and the BTBA list
- Ten unfairly neglected books
Nonbookish Linkage
- How Prozac changed the way we think
- “I think this generation in their 20s or possibly a bit older will be the first generation in Western Europe to have had a net loss of knowledge.”
- Courtesy of NASA, find out what happens when astronauts poop their pants
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.
Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”
