Recommended.

In “The Cranks Who Swear by Citronella Oil” at the Observer, Nick Cohen uses the instructive example of homeopathy to expose the dangerous climate of anti-elitism (read: celebration of ignorance and stupidity) that stifles modern intellectuals.

From the 2007 New Yorker Festival comes a conversation (on video) between Martin Amis and Ian Buruma on writing about monstrous figures.

At the New York Times, Charles McGrath looks into the trend of publishing unedited material.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Steven Johnson examines Amazon’s text statistics.

. . .the two stats that I found totally fascinating were “Average Words Per Sentence” and “% Complex Words,” the latter defined as words with three or more syllables–words like “ameliorate”, “protoplasm” or “motherf***er.”

Recommended with reservations.

Salon is running an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein that fairly crackles with tonic intellectual rigor.

The New York Times has an article about threats to Germany’s book culture.

“I also grew up in a remote town,” she said, “and it was the same system that distributed drugs to pharmacies overnight. The books came with the drugs on the same trucks.”

Drugs for the body. Books for the mind and soul. If you want proof that a cultural divide separates Europe and America, the book business is a place to start.

A short story of mine, “Desert Rose,” appears in the October issue of Word Riot.

I now realize that my earlier perception of circumscribed causal reach was a consequence of my attachment to a mechanical model of reality, whereas the world under that glass sheet obeys only organic laws, by which everything is interconnected in ways that cannot be reduced to the mere collisions and repulsions of metal balls and plastic knobs.

Read more pinball philosophy on the home page of n + 1.

John Lanchester at the LRB reviews Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.

At the New York Times, Robert Frank reviews Robert B. Reich’s Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story on the ways in which technology has altered reading habits.

With search engines able to scan millions of print sources for a single passage, a generation with an already short attention span is being encouraged to behave like literary “hunters,” snatching up nuggets for classroom credit without necessarily benefiting from the rhythm and the flow of the entire written work.

Recommended.

Anne Enright has won this year’s Man Booker prize for her novel The Gathering.

A falling star at Manchester takes a potshot at a rising one.

“Chick lit” is certainly a dire development, but it is not the nadir of contemporary fiction. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a story airing discontent with the rise of “Ghetto lit.”

Recommended.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Doris Lessing of Britain, with the Swedish Academy taking particular note of her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook.

It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman’s relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge, love juice, man cream, and la leche.

So opens Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid by Dr. Lisa Jean Moore.

10 Zen Monkeys asks. A few hardy individuals answer.

Erik Davis:

. . .I find most comments sections boring and/or tendentious and/or tough to read for one still invested in proper grammar.

Mark Dery:

As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn’t begin with Dawson’s Landing.

John Shirley:

Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.

And in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.

The New York Times has a review by Richard Eder of The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Stephane Audeguy’s The Theory of Clouds.

We need more fiction featuring librarians.

Recommended with reservations.

In Logos Ian Williams revisits Irving Howe’s biography of Leon Trotsky.

Certainly it could be argued that the neocons inherited from Trotsky the passion for the importance of ideas, and of fighting for them, and also that that intoxication, transferred from the heady intellectualism and sectarianism of the sundered American socialist movement, has transformed American conservatism, which had previously tended more naturally to empiricist defenses of the status quo or to golden days.

He was the greatest union organizer of the latter half of the 20th century. In the span of a single decade, the 1960s, Albert Shanker did for public school teachers what Walter Reuther did for autoworkers.

At Slate Sara Mosle reviews Richard Kahlenberg’s Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.