To mark the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a coalition of OWS working groups called Strike Debt have released The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual, a free (and downloadable) book offering “specific tactics for understanding and fighting against the debt system.” Five thousand copies of the book will be distributed around New York City this weekend, and at an Occupy event in Washington Square Park.
Last week, Masha Gessen—author of The Man Without a Face (about Vladimir Putin), a book on mathematician Grigori Perelman, and other works—was the editor of one of Russia’s most respected popular science magazines. This week, she’s out of a job, thanks in part to her refusal to send a reporter to cover president Vladimir Putin’s latest PR stunt: hang-gliding while reintroducing cranes into the wild. Gessen had been anticipating the firing for months, and calls it “faster and less painful” than she had imagined. Gessen recently protested Putin’s tactics in an op-ed for the New York Daily News, in which she spoke out against the arrest of three members of the Russian punk collective Pussy Riot.
No Easy Day, a Navy SEAL’s account of the Osama Bin Laden assassination, sold 253,000 copies in its first week, becoming the first book to knock Fifty Shades of Gray out of the top slot of the Nielsen bestseller since late April. The book, authored by a SEAL writing under the pen name “Mark Owen,” has been Amazon’s number-one seller for the past three weeks. Contrary to earlier rumors, however, Steven Spielberg won’t be adapting the book into a movie.
The Awl excerpts noir master James M. Cain’s lost novel The Cocktail Waitress: “The Wigwam looked normal enough on the outside, just a double door with a sign over it, which Tom pushed open as though he’d been there before. But inside, it seemed different from any club I’d been in, though of course I hadn’t been in too many.”
Is the Atlantic making us stupid? At the LARB, Pamela Erens wonders whether the magazine’s impressive roster of “sex-marriage-mommy pieces” are actually, as the editors claim, “enlightening rather than just entertaining its public.” Says Erens: “The record is mixed.”
