The Lad
On the Crime Beat
At The Awl, a gritty interview with Daily News crime reporter Kerry Burke (who was once featured in a Bravo "reality show" Tabloid Wars that I loved but that was sadly cancelled). Burke says, "I'm not a very nice person. I'm not from a nice place. At the same time, I love these people. These are my people."
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Apple’s Foray into Education Publishing
If you missed Apple's "Education Announcement" last Thursday, you can check out Peter Kafka's play-by-play coverage of the event for AllThingsD. The whole affair made quite a splash because the biggest publishers in the world today are education publishers. The star of the show was iBooks 2, and it has many people talking: some view it as education publishing's savior, some fear it, and others think its EULA is downright creepy. At least one person believes the whole idea might've been the brain child of a lowly intern. And, finally, what should we make of Steve Jobs' 1996 admission that "what's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology?"
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Stevenson as Kurtz
"Since the middle of the 20th century, the academy has conditioned us to stay grounded within texts and steer clear of writers’ biographies for insights while biographers are often timid about the kind of playful speculation that we can undertake here in Slate. Readers, myself included, tend to wonder about the sources for characters the likes of Kurtz, Sherlock Holmes, and Jay Gatsby—larger-than-life, mysterious, existing on a kind of separate plane—and in doing so we are continuing the quests of the narrators who tried first (Marlow, Watson, and Carraway)." Matthew Pearl asks: was Robert Louis Stevenson the blueprint for Conrad's Kurtz?
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Where to Begin
What’s the best book to introduce someone to the late Terry Pratchett? The Color of Magic, his first Discworld novel, is an intuitive choice, but it may not be the right one. In The Guardian, Sam Jordison kicks off a debate about the ideal entree to Pratchett’s work. You could also read our tribute to the author.
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Your friendly neighborhood poet laureate
A while back, we reviewed an anthology of work by American poets laureate--that is, those appointed by the President to serve the entire United States. But there are 45 currently-serving state poets laureate, and thousands of city, county, and other poets laureate as well. What exactly do they do?
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Look at Other People Looking
"Delight in book collecting, and in showing off one’s book collection, is common, if not universal, among readers and would-be-readers. The biggest reason we spend money on books is because we want to read them (eventually), but that isn’t the only reason: we also like to look at them, and to look at other people looking at them." Over at The Point, Jake Bittle considers why we collect books as opposed to simply reading them. He also points out, correctly, that books are very, very unpleasant to move, something our own Matt Seidel can confirm.
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