- History’s 10 best prison breaks.
- A Paid Content column argues that the true genius of the Kindle is that it breaks the trend toward multi-tasking…
- …But there is still a huge amount of confusion surrounding the Kindle’s DRM policies.
- AbeBooks aggregates some summer reading lists.
- VQR compiles a brief reading list for those following the post-election protests in Iran.
- Bay Area readers: Conversational Reading is taking a page from The Millions playbook and hosting a San Francisco indie bookstore walking tour. Sounds fun!
Curiosities: SF Tour
Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness
Who’s the official Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Officer at your place of work? You mean you don’t have one? Well, get on that promptly. The Center for Disease Control advises that “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack,” so you might as well kill five birds with one stone.
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Welcome Dixon Bean Brown!
The Millions family keeps getting bigger! A big welcome to our newest Millions reader: Dixon Bean Brown born June 22nd to our long-time staff writers Edan Lepucki and Patrick Brown.
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Curios
NPR offers a nifty gallery that accompanies the publication of this quirky collection: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.The Coen Brothers have signed on to helm the film version of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The big-screen version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found (though it’s reportedly been in the works for years).Elsewhere in book-to-movie news, Ian McEwen is pleased with the film version of his novel Atonement.Poet and critic Reginald Shepherd reflects on becoming a blogger. “Until a couple of years ago, I barely knew what a blog was, and certainly had never seen one,” he writes. But it proved quite fruitful: “it sometimes seems that my blog has done more to raise my profile than all my more-than-fifteen years of copious publishing put together.”Five reasons not to give up books (the paper ones, as opposed the digital counterparts.)I think it’s an ad for a video game, but this video contains some masterful soccer kung fu.None of us at The Millions is affiliated with Princeton, but this list of the school’s most influential alums is interesting in a random sort of way.The new half-hour HBO show In Treatment is a free podcast at the iTunes store. The show stars Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist and each episode represents a single session with one of five patients.The writers’ strike is over. The resulting carnage on the schedules for all your favorite shows is laid out here.
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Epistolary Criticism
Full Stop’s book club is discussing the stories of Clarice Lispector throughout this week in an in-depth email exchange conducted by contributors Becca Rothfeld and Nathan Goldman. Pair with Magdalena Edwards‘s Millions review of the collection.
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New Margaret Atwood Coming in September
MaddAddam, the third book in Margaret Atwood’s trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood will be out in the U.S. in September. Bonus: the cover of the book’s Australian edition.