In the wake of news that Bibles are among the most frequently downloaded Apps, the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog contacted heads of several New York City religious institutions to ask how the digital age is transforming worship.
The Baffler has just signed a $500,000 deal with MIT Press guaranteeing three issues a year for the next five years. Surveying the deal, the Observer catches a new name on the masthead: twenty-four-year-old hacker Aaron Schwartz, who made headlines this summer for leaking four million JSTOR articles.
Legendary book designer Chip Kidd, most recently known for designing the cover of Murakami’s 1Q84, will write an original Batman graphic novel, tentatively titled "Batman: Death By Design.”
A new iPad app calls Subtext lets readers add links and have “Facebook style discussions” within their e-books.
“He invited me back to his house that night at about 2 or 2:30 in the morning, and I noticed this beautiful nickel-plated 12-gauge shotgun on his wall. I was raised around weapons all my life, being from Kentucky, so I said, 'Wow, that’s a really good-looking 12-gauge.' And he said, 'Would you like to fire it?' And I said, 'Yeah, sure, I’ll fire it.' And he said, 'Shit, man, we must build a bomb!' So we built this bomb out of propane tanks and nitroglycerin, took it out in his backyard, and he gave me first crack” — Johnny Depp recalls his friendship with Hunter S. Thompson.
