Former US president Jimmy Carter is writing “an impassioned account of the human rights abuses against women and girls around the world, particularly in religious societies,” according to Simon & Schuster, which is planning to publish the book in late March.
The MIT Media Lab is teaching a class this semester that aims to make science fiction real. Emphasizing “pataphysics,” or the science of imaginary solutions, the class is taught by Sophia Brueckner and Dan Novy and features William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on the syllabus, alongside films such as The Matrix, an essay by Donna Haraway, and short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney, and Ray Bradbury, among others. Students are encouraged to use science fiction as the inspiration for “the ethical and thoughtful design of new technologies.”
According to an annual survey, first editions of Madonna’s 1992, spiral-bound, metal-covered book of erotica, Sex, topped the list of the one hundred most sought after out-of-print publications for 2013. Also in demand and hard to find: Stephen King’s My Pretty Pony (illustrated by the artist Barbara Kruger), Salvador Dali’s The Jerusalem Bible, Gary Winogrand’s Women Are Beautiful, and Nora Roberts’s Promise Me Tomorrow (a book said to be so bad that its author once promised it would never be reprinted).
Employees are apparently readying themselves for an imminent round of layoffs at Time Inc.
It’s not exactly The Wolf of Wall Street, but the subject of Martin Scorsese’s next film is…the New York Review of Books.
Bookslut has launched a new prize for old books. The first round of the Daphne will be awarded not to the best of 2013 but to an unjustly overlooked title published fifty years ago, in 1963.