Posted by Jason Diamond On “How was Your Week,” Julie Klausner somehow takes her opening conversation from the connection between comedians and magicians to how she will never take an epsom salt bath to relax, because it always reminds her of Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas without even blinking — or whatever you do on the air that is the equivalent of blinking.
Male Writers: Keep on chugging coffee as you write your novel
Posted by Jason Diamond If you find yourself making frequent trips to your local joint that serves Stumptown or Intelligentsia coffee as you type away at that book you’ve been working on, it might be to your benefit. According to a study done by Harvard researchers, men who downed the most coffee – six or more cups a day – were nearly 20 percent less likely to develop any form of prostate cancer and a whopping 60 percent less likely […]
Morning Bites: Jon-Jon Goulian Excerpt, Burroughs obscenity charges, Frey visits Oprah, and more
A Turkish publisher is currently facing obscenity charges for releasing an edition of the William Burroughs novel, The Soft Machine. NPR has an excerpt from Jon-Jon Goulian’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt. At Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams discusses James Frey’s “infuriating” return visit to Oprah. Ever hear the garage band Rick James and Neil Young were in?
Will Ferrell to meet Mark Twain
Posted by Jason Diamond Will Ferrell will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American at a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on October 23. (Via Splitsider) (Art by Margarita Korol)
Morning Bites: Mailer’s house, Anna Politkovskaya, Colin Meloy for the kids, and more
Inside Norman Mailer’s former house that is up for sale. Salon reviews Is Journalisim Worth Dying For? By Anna Politkovskaya Josh Spilker talks about that one-book bookstore. Jacket Copy talks about Colin Meloy’s book for kids. Hopefully it will contain no mentions of “maidenhead.” Everything you should probably know about Jim O’Rourke. (Via Largehearted Boy)
Interview with a Google Employee About the Google Death App.
By Sean Patrick Cooper Since early-March, vague rumors have circulated online about the validity of Google producing a new smartphone Application capable of predicting the day you will die. The rumors, it seems, are true. Two nights ago, I sat down to discuss this App, known as Word Count, with a friend of a good friend of mine, who works at Google. To protect his job security, he spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. We met at a […]
Where Have all the Good Times Gone/AOL to Crush Us All
Posted by Jason Diamond If you’re at all interested in how AOL plans to dominate the internet, here you go. I think this means that in the future, when you Google search for books, you will be directed straight to Huffington Post’s book section. When you are looking for ‘David Foster Wallace,” expect to swim through a search result sea of results like “Top Ten Ice Creams that go great while reading The Pale King,” and “Pictures of Puppies reading […]
Party like a Luddite
Posted by Jason Diamond Did you know it was the 200th anniversary of the British Luddite protests? Because I sure didn’t. Dissent Magazine did, and they revisit the movement that current day people claim to be a part of when they don’t have the newest version of the iPad, or they just started “on the Twitter.”