A new report by Gartner Research predicts that 10 to 15 percent of all ratings and reviews generated through social media will be fake by 2014—they’ll be written either by the author or somebody with a vested interest in the success of the product. So perhaps this is a good time to pay attention to Galleycat’s roundup of the top customer reviewers on Amazon.
Just in time for the publication of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, a radical Iranian organization has raised the bounty on Rushdie’s head from $500,000 to $3.3 million. When reached for comment, Rushdie seemed unperturbed: "I'm not inclined to magnify this ugly bit of headline-grabbing by paying it much attention," he told the Los Angeles Times through his publisher.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maria Bustillos offers a “corrective” to Hannah Rosin’s The End of Men.
In response to the Mother Jones video in which Mitt Romney said 47 percent of Americans beleive they are “victims” who are “dependent upon government” and won’t ever vote for him, Roxanne Gay weighs in on the politics of entitlement.
“A therapist once told me I should stop dating writers and just be one. That was good advice”: Molly Ringwald talks to New York magazine about her new collection of short stories, which Choire Sicha reviewed in our new issue.
A previously unpublished essay by Agatha Christie that praises the virtues of British crime fiction has been dug out of the archives and published for the first time as the preface to a reissue of the 1933 novel Ask a Policeman.
