Tim Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Then, four years after its publication, he received a box of J. Edgar Hoover’s “personal files on [FBI] intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972” from a well-connected D.C. lawyer. That treasure trove of information has since wound up in his recently published book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, and he sat with NPR’s Terry Gross to talk all about it.
Tim Weiner Knows Every Secret Ever
Midweek Links
I thoroughly enjoyed the second installment of Emdashes’ Ask the New Yorker Librarians series.Michiko Kakutani hates Jonathan Franzen’s new memoir, The Discomfort Zone. Kakutani’s wrath filled pen aside, Ed explains why she’s right, and I have to agree. I looked back through the archives here and realized I hadn’t elaborated on it much beyond writing back in 2003 that “Franzen’s non-fiction bugs the heck out of me,” but it put me off enough that I avoided reading The Corrections for a long time because of it.Speaking of reviews, it’s a good thing Bob Dylan didn’t get the Franzen treatment. He tells contactmusic.com that while he doesn’t care about music reviews, the reviews for Chronicles Vol. 1 meant a lot to him: “Most people who write about music, they have no idea what if feels like to play it, but, with the book I wrote, I thought, ‘The people who are writing reviews of this book, man, they know what the hell they’re talking about. They know how to write a book, they know more about it than me.’ The reviews of this book, some of ’em almost made me cry – in a good way. I’d never felt that from a music critic, ever.”Even though it seems like there’s another “book banning” story in the news every week, the AP reports that the 405 challenges reported to the American Library Association last year is the smallest number since they started keeping track in the early 1980s. The challenges have dropped by more than half since the ALA started Banned Books Week to promote free expression. Kudos to the librarians.The second most brilliant magazine in the world (refer to the top item in this list for the first), The Economist has a characteristically well-considered a piece on the newspaper industry’s timid efforts to embrace the Internet. Thanks to Millions contributor Andrew for sending this along.
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Infinite Stupidity
Why innovate when you can just Google and copy? Mark Pagel on the perils of “being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet.”
E-book Release Delays
An article in the Wall Street Journal about the third publishing house — HarperCollins, who joined Simon & Schuster and Hachette — to delay e-book publication of new (hardcover) titles. The debate over timing and pricing of new-release e-books (@$9.99) continues.
A Tale of Murder
Over at The Atlantic, Terrence Rafferty claims that women are writing the best crime novels. “Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side,” he writes. Pair with this Millions piece on novels where women are true detectives.
Grant Snider’s muse-inspiring cartoons
The work of literary cartoonist Grant Snider has been featured in such places as the New York Times and Electric Literature (part 2, part 3). We also love this comic on poetry. But don’t wait for the curators to endorse your dose of comic cheer–every one of these pieces can be seen on Snider’s Tumblr page.