Water coolers across the nation were abuzz this week with news of the James Cameron-backed and billionaire-led initiative to begin mining resources from the asteroid belt. It’s the stuff of science fiction, and it may seem hard to believe, but the company’s actually already begun hiring prospective space miners!
Looking for a Job? In Space?
A Light Roast, Please
File this one under "Things I Didn't Know I Needed" -- actor Paul Giamatti playing Honoré de Balzac hopped up on fifty coffees.
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Popular Library Borrowed E-Books
OverDrive released its lists of the most-downloaded e-books from libraries in December 2011. These lists look pretty different from the current New York Times e-book bestseller lists. Here's why.
Finding the Fairy Tale Capital
Where is the fairy tale capital of the world? Atlas Obscura investigates. We write about the problem with fairy tales.
Publishing’s Other Imbalance Problem
“The reality is, there are just not a lot of POC authors out there,” writes Ellen Oh in her essay on non-white authors. “We are not representing the 37% of our population when we only amount to 10% of publishing.”
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Laughing at Lawyers
"Yes, it’s easy to laugh at the lawyers. But what if the lawyers were right? For the question that still needs to be answered, I think, is whether the arguments over the novel’s obscenity and obscurity were just temporary historical effects or whether they point to the essence of Joyce’s originality." A longform look at why we should still find Ulysses scandalous.
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“Did you know that the Bosphorus is drying up?”
Orhan Pamuk paints a nightmarish picture of the land laid bare when the Bosphorus dries up.