“That’s how George got his glass eye.”

As if it wasn’t tough enough for a book reviewer to get page space, now they’ve got to compete with Rob Lowe, Al Gore, and the silent half of Penn & Teller. Thanks, Grey Lady.

The essay is more popular than ever. At Salon, Michele Filgate talks to Leslie Jamison (author of The Empathy Exams, here’s our review) and Roxane Gay (author of the forthcoming Bad Feminist) about the power of the genre. Gay believes our interest in essays is because of a “cultural preoccupation with the exposure of the self.” They also discuss if we’re in a golden age of women essayists. “Sometimes when men write about private feeling, it’s seen as exploratory or daring, and when women write about private feeling it’s seen as limited or in the vein of a kind of circumscribed emotional writing,” Jamison says.

For book voyeurs, the Book Depository has a live, real-time map of people actually buying books from them across the world. (via Guardian’s Book Blog)

In 2002, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor and expert in judgement and decision-making, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research in behavioral studies. At the LARB, K.C. Cole ties his work to The Fate of Our Species, a new book by Fred Guterl.