Steve Jobs’s authorized biography comes out today. Among the highlights, Jobs wanted to revolutionize the $8-billion-a-year textbook industry by giving textbooks away for free with iPads; he declared “thermonuclear war” against Google for copying iPhone features in its Android phone; and he regretted waiting to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer.
In an echo of the Juan Williams affair, NPR has fired freelancer Lisa Simeone for her involvement with the Occupy Washington D.C. movement. Simeone hosts the World of Opera program, and works for the show Soundprint, both of which are produced by NPR-affiliate stations and distributed through National Public Radio. She was fired after the conservative Daily Caller website accused her of violating the taxpayer-subsidized station’s ethics policy. “I don’t cover politics,” Simeone said to a left-wing blog after her firing. “What is NPR afraid I’ll do—insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?”
Is it illegal for politicians to use campaign contributions to buy their own books? Herman Cain—author of This is Herman Cain!—doesn’t seem to think so.
Harvard’s Nieman Lab on a high-tech literary feud: “Last month, Jeff Jarvis published his new book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. Last week, Evgeny Morozov published a scathing review of it. In response, Jarvis rebutted Morozov via Twitter, Google+, and then, finally, a Google Doc (custom link: http://bit.ly/AnsweringMrGrumpy) that copied Morozov’s nearly-7,000-word review, in full, and then proceeded to plug the holes Morozov had hacked therein.”
Your daily dose of Murakami-mania: The New York Times Magazine runs Sam Anderson’s breathless account of visiting the author in Tokyo—where Anderson was shocked to find that Murakami’s cool cosmopolitan capital bore little resemblance to the radically foreign city he immediately got lost in—and Parul Seghal poses six questions to Jay Rubin, Murakami’s longtime translator.
And just for fun: Moby-Dick covers through the ages; the missed connections of Occupy Wall Street.
