The American writer Jonathan Schell died last night, of cancer, in his home in Brooklyn. From his early work as a young Vietnam War correspondent for the New Yorker, through his meticulous yet sweeping case for nuclear disarmament in The Fate of the Earth, to his magisterial rethinking of state and popular power in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Schell embodied the best of a distinctively American, progressive civic-republican tradition—and of a WASP cultural sensibility about which he was ambivalent and humorously self-deprecating. Schell set a powerful

The New Yorker excerpts Teju Cole’s new/old novel, Every Day is For the Thief. Cole originally published the book in 2007 with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press; yesterday, Random House released it in revised form. Yasmine El Rashidi reviews the book in our new issue.

The U.K.’s new prohibition on sending books to prisoners has met with outrage. The classics scholar Mary Beard called it “crazy”; the novelist Mark Haddon vowed to get "every writer in the UK publicly opposed to this by tea time." A petition has already garnered nearly 15,000 signatures.

Zoë Heller and Mohsin Hamid consider the

Paul Krugman christens Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty, “the most important economics book of the year—and maybe the decade.” Piketty argues for a world-wide tax on wealth, like an “an annual property tax,” John Cassidy explains in the New Yorker. In Bookforum, Doug Henwood finds much to praise in Piketty’s work, but is frustrated by the book’s temperate political vision: “For Piketty, the main problem with Marx is his unequivocal call for political confrontation. Having described a process of inexorable material polarization—and with it, increasing

: "Unruly ronin as well as troubling double agent of the simulacra, Sturtevant remains for me a quintessentially American artist."

Holly George Warren will be on hand at McNally Jackson Books in New York tonight to discuss her biography of rocker Alex Chilton, A Man Called Destruction.

Last month, Simon & Schuster canceled its six-figure book contract with writer John Lefevre after it was revealed that Lefevre, who was writing an insider’s account of the financial industry titled Straight to Hell, did not work at Goldman Sachs, as his popular Twitter account had claimed. But Lefevre’s book has proven to be more durable than his credibility. According to publisher Morgan Entrenkin, Grove Press has purchased Straight to Hell, and will publish it in November 2014.

“Lorem Ipsum,” the paragraph of nonsense Latin used since the 16th century as dummy text, was designed “to have

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Pankaj Mishra and Daniel Mendelsohn discuss canon formation. “How do we know what’s ‘the greatest’? . . . [I]s the agenda always somehow political?” Meanwhile, Jason Diamond agrees with Natasha Vargas-Cooper that the novelist Denis Johnson deserves more recognition. Is Johnson “the most influential living fiction writer in America today”? Maybe, maybe not: over at The Millions, Matt Seidel satirizes the whole business of classification. In Seidel’s host of nonsense categories, novelists are “arthritic” or “lithe”; “robust” or “insinuating”; “hypoallergenic”

At the New Yorker’s News Desk blog, novelist and former Air Force pilot James Salter ponders the missing Malaysian airplane, and imagines what it was like to be on board: “There have been no announcements, or, worse, there has been an ominous announcement that causes panic. At some point, the passengers, perhaps coming out of sleep, know.” Meanwhile, at Wired, pilot Chris Goodfellow offers a simple theory about what happened.

Felix Salmon analyzes Dorian Nakamoto’s denial that he was the creator of the internet currency scheme, Bitcoin, as reported in Newsweek last week.

For universities,

TED-Ed educates the masses on the debate over the Oxford (or "serial") comma—via video, a medium in which you can avoid the issue altogether. Bookforum, it should go without saying, is pro-Oxford.

At Moby Lives, Dustin Kurtz writes that China’s publishing industry, which is “becoming more venal,” “seems to have a rather gross case of the Franzens, and the attention brought by Mo Yan’s Nobel win might be to blame.”

The Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo has won the Pen-Hemingway Award for her first novel, We Need New Names.

James Franco's debut collection of poems, Directing Herbert White

At Vanity Fair, James Wolcott looks at rise of “name-brand journalists” like Arianna Huffington, Malcolm Gladwell, Ezra Klein, and Nate Silver, and wonders if their enterprises are sustainable: “The demands of being a byline superhero can spread a journalist’s time and focus so thin—all those honoraria to collect!—that he or she may start serving up skimpily researched quickies or, worse, sloppy seconds.”

A report on the lack of persons of color in children’s books.

The Quarterly Conversation’s spring issue is dedicated to Lydia Davis, including articles and reviews of the American short

The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night. The winners are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (fiction), Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (nonfiction), Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog (poetry), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (criticism), Amy Wilentz’s Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (autobiography), and Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift (biography).

Nate Silver talks about the relaunch of his FiveThirtyEight blog, which goes live Monday afternoon.

The poet Bill Knott has died. The author of numerous collections

Hugh Eakin reports on the Lahore LitFest in Pakistan. Lahore is a city “under siege.” Terrorist attacks led many intellectuals to leave, and security threats have caused international diplomats to abandon the area. “Checkpoints have become common, blackouts are frequent. And so it was that a group of Lahori intellectuals decided to fight back in the way they best know how: with words and books and open debate.”

Author Joe McGinnis died on Monday at the age of 71. McGinnis was the author of The Selling of the President and, perhaps most famously, the true-crime blockbuster Fatal Vision, about

The Moth has announced that it will honor Zadie Smith with the 2014 Moth Award at its 13th annual gala on May 13.

Journalist Matthew Power has died at age 39 while on assignment in Uganda. The Times reports that the cause of death was probably heat stroke. Harper’s Magazine has granted free access to all of Power’s work for that publication; his work can also be found at Men’s Journal; the VQR; and Longreads.

In a New York magazine profile, n+1 editor and author Benjamin Kunkel discusses his forthcoming book essays, Utopia or Bust, his move from novelist to lefty public intellectual, and his