Laura Miller at Salon covers the German teen plagiarism posturing.

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism—despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

At Salon Rahul K. Parikh interviews Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

[He] has only been a practicing surgeon for six years, and he is still just an assistant professor at Harvard, but his game-changing New Yorker essay about the gobsmacking cost of healthcare in McAllen, Texas, became required reading in the White House. As a New Yorker staff writer, Gawande has long been known for his meditative, honest and lyrical essays about medicine, but his work became that much more important as healthcare exploded into a national conversation (and crisis).

Laura Miller of Salon urges readers to move outside of their literary comfort zones.

We all have our little biases, and far be it from me to suggest that people force themselves to read books they don’t like, but sometimes that’s all these preferences are — prejudices. Getting out of your rut can lead to unexpected and exhilarating rewards.

Laura Miller of Salon misses the march of weird little marks.

Authors who have eschewed quotation marks include E.L. Doctorow, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Kate Grenville, William Gaddis and (sometimes) Raymond Carver.

Why do they do this? I once heard Doctorow tell a group of journalists that if a writer knows what he’s doing, quotation marks aren’t really necessary. “You can tell when it’s dialogue,” he explained. Often enough, that’s true. However, to say that an element of written language can be eliminated without rendering the language itself incomprehensible is not tantamount to saying that the element is superfluous and ought to be abandoned.

For Salon Laura Miller reviews Nick Laird’s Glover’s Mistake.

At Salon Stephanie Zacharek reviews Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.

Shell begins by outlining the history of mass production in America (perhaps not surprisingly, firearms were among the first items to be mass-produced) and the rise of the discount chain. In the late 1800s a sickly farmer’s son named Frank W. Woolworth opened the first “five-and-dime”; later, foreshadowing a future that workers around the world now seem doomed to live out, he quipped, “We must have cheap labor or we cannot sell cheap goods. When a clerk gets so good she can earn better wages elsewhere, let her go.” The understanding is that she’ll have somewhere else to go, where her skills and talents are wanted or needed, considered something worth paying for. But increasingly in our current work climate, more skills only make a worker more expensive and possibly more demanding, not more desirable.

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon reviews Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism.

This is still an exceptionally difficult subject for Americans to confront with any clarity, I think. Our political life remains haunted in peculiar ways by the specter of Communism, which has become (to mix metaphors) an all-purpose ideological cudgel to use against one’s enemies.

What is the deal with Western men’s erotic obsession with the East?

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Richard Bernstein’s The East, the West, and Sex.

At Salon Allen Barra reviews Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles.

At Salon Sarah Hepola reports the disappearance of gay-themed books from Amazon’s search results and sales rankings.

In reviewing two new family memoirs–The Sisters Antipodes by Jane Alison and When Skateboards Will Be Free by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh–Andrew O’Hehir at Salon appropriately begins with Larkin.

At Salon Vincent Rossmeier interviews Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution.

Let’s talk about the somewhat notorious case of the journalist John Seigenthaler. Why did that case impact Wikipedia in such a momentous way?

John Seigenthaler is a journalist who was running a journalism institute at Vanderbilt and there was a rather short Wikipedia entry on him. He wrote a commentary for USA Today saying that, to his horror, he discovered his Wikipedia entry falsely claimed he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. And he said this shows you how terrible Wikipedia is. What good is the site if these types of things can crop up?

Barbara Vine is a pen name used by the crime novelist Ruth Rendell, ostensibly for stories of psychological suspense rather than the police procedurals of the Inspector Wexford series, though this distinction is not strictly observed. Rendell’s detective fiction has its moments, but seldom transcends its genre. However, her less conventional novels deploy a sardonic moral calculus reminiscent of a certain dark vein in British literary fiction.

Laura Miller of Salon reviews Barbara Vine’s The Birthday Present.

Salon has Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

As Critchley, chairman of the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research in New York, sees it, the great deficiency of modern life lies in our too-common unwillingness to fully acknowledge our mortality. Frantic to “deny the fact of death,” we “run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness” — namely, traditional religion and New Age claptrap promising us one or another form of immortality.

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers.

Salon is running an Associated Press story on a financing deal between The New York Times Company and Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim.

For Salon Andrew O’Hehir reviews Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air.

Although Johnson does his best to view the rest of Priestley’s life and career through an optimistic prism, other authors might indeed paint it more sardonically. After making a discovery so big no living person could understand it, he was first driven out of England by monarchist, Anglican thugs (as amusing as that concept may sound today) and then demonized as a French spy and nearly deported from the United States under the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts signed by his former friend John Adams.

At Salon Jason Boog examines missed opportunities in book publishing.

“It’s going to be very hard for the next few years across the board in literary fiction,” says veteran agent Ira Silverberg. “A lot of good writers will be losing their editors, and loyalty is very important in this field.”

Salon and Big Think present a conversation with Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany.

Laura Miller presents Salon’s 2008 Book Awards.

To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence. I remember having lunch with him in a ratty ethnic dive off Times Square in early 2000, when he explained that, what with one thing and another, he’d somehow drifted out of the practice of reviewing books. That happens to many a fine critic; take time off to write your own book or to work some other beat, and eventually you migrate to the inactive section of book review editors’ rolodexes. It bothered him.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers John Leonard.

Salon has James Hannaham’s review of Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines.

Sol, an arrogant boy from California, is convinced he is some sort of messiah. Huston draws him with biting specificity and detail, in the process nailing the dark side of American narcissism and child worship. She has a fast-paced style, as breathless as Philip Roth’s, deceptively light though deeply engaged in current events. Sol’s parents have childproofed the house by covering the electrical sockets and putting soft corners on all the furniture, but as soon as Sol is alone, he enthusiastically seeks out images of pornography and torture on the Internet. Huston spares us neither the outrageous vulgarity of the hypocritical environment in which Sol’s parents raise him nor its appalling effect on his personality.

Writing for Salon, Edward McClelland covers David Foster Wallace’s McCain’s Promise, Cliff Schecter’s The Real McCain, Paul Begala’s Third Term, and Matt Welch’s The Myth of a Maverick.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question “Who Was John McCain?” — or, more pointedly, “Who Were the Two John McCains?” — they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it’s been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers David Foster Wallace.

“Last December. . .a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” The speaker is Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, and the wife is Rema, an Argentine considerably younger than her husband. Confronted with this ingenious impostor (she’s so good he briefly contemplates the possibility that one of her feet might really be his wife’s), Leo is initially nonplused. Soon, however, he formulates a plan: find the real Rema.

Laura Miller at Salon reviews Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances.

At Salon Rebecca Johnson goes in search of blurbs.

Surely no boy of 9 could ever conceive of artfully juxtaposing an account of Nero’s oft-frustrated attempts to assassinate his mother with the boy’s own disillusionment upon discovering his mum canoodling with one of their married hosts?

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans.

Laura Miller at Salon probes Barack Obama’s reading history.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he’d given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

. . .Rebecca’s article is too sad to bear, and although I, too, have written about my troubled relationship with my mother, I did not have the heart to do so in a major way while she was alive. I waited until after her death to do so — and still I feared that I was both committing a sin and tempting fate. Exposing your mother’s nakedness in public, breaking publicly with the only woman who ever gave birth to you, is a tabooed, ungrateful, desperate, perhaps dangerous and always complicated act.

Phyllis Chesler, writing for Salon, covers the split between Alice Walker and her daughter, Rebecca Walker.

In “Who Killed the Literary Critic?” at Salon Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, spurred by Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (I noted the TLS’s review in March), discuss the future of literary criticism.

Or perhaps, also like me, my uncle hoped that if one day he did manage to read Needham’s epic from start to finish, he would learn the answer to the famous “Needham question”: How did it come to pass that a civilization with such an astounding history of inventiveness and scholarship and intellectual curiosity failed to make the leap into the modern world of science? Where did China go wrong? Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe, and not China?

Writing for Salon, Andrew Leonard reviews Simon Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Winchester (or his publisher) certainly should have stopped directly before the colon.

At Salon Gary Kamiya reviews Gerard DeGroot’s The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade.

The writers at Salon present a round-up of new books on the war in Iraq.

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter.

At Salon, Stephen Marche writes of the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Laura Miller at Salon covers Maya Angelou’s poem of tribute to Hillary Clinton and Toni Morrison’s letter of endorsement to Barack Obama.

Salon’s end-of-year picks usually are, to my taste, the best around. This year’s selections are peculiarly uninspired.

Salon’s Literary Guide to the World has an entry on Washington, D. C.

At Salon Jonathon Keats reviews Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.

Salon has a lukewarm review of Nathan McCall’s Them.

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

Salon has an interview with Jonathan Kozol, author of Letters to a Young Teacher.

Salon has a delightful interview with the steely Dr. Taner Edis, author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam.

In an opinion piece at Salon, Gary Kamiya avers that editors are even more important in the Internet age than they were when print ruled the land.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

Salon is running a review of Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual.

At Salon, Astra Taylor reviews Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

The book apparently features numerous examples of painful compromise that will be familiar to area readers, such as the story of Brendan, “a former lawyer at the progressive Center for the Study of Responsive Law, who switched career tracks for the bigger paycheck needed to buy a house within commuting distance of D.C.”

Salon is running a review by Alexander Nazaryan of A Russian Diary, the posthumously published record of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Anyone curious about why Russia’s post-Soviet flirtation with democracy has been such an erratic affair will find [the book] an indispensable tome. A reporter for Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper), one of Russia’s last organs of liberal media, Politkovskaya gained prominence–and notoriety–by chronicling the gradual depredation of civil liberties that began when Putin took power in 1999 and reopened the Chechen conflict that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had waged to keep the small mountain region from gaining autonomy.

Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment last fall with several point-blank shots that, as any Russian knows, signal a contract killing.

In a Salon interview Jonathan Lethem, author of You Don’t Love Me Yet, wails against copyright law and celebrates appropriation.

Salon has an article by Tom Lutz on authors who want readers to stop reading in the academic mode.

Francine Prose, for instance. In her latest book, “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them,” Prose rails against the FemiMarxiDecons in English departments that are destroying literature and everything holy.

A Salon reader asks:

The thought of publishing the novel terrifies me. However, I do long to be published. I would not be happy just writing for the sake of writing. I want to write to be heard. It’s just that I’m afraid of being heard, as much as I want it.

. . .Have any suggestions?

Salon answers.

Salon has a review of Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y.

Salon has a best-of list twist: some of their favorite authors weigh in on the best books of 2006. The list so handily transcends the meme that it should be in a separate category entirely.