paper trail

Aug 2, 2012 @ 12:09:00 am

London is now home to the world’s most distracting maze. (It’s made out of 250,000 books).

Do spoilers ruin a book? Not necessarily, says a paper in the September issue of Psychological Science. While most people say that they'd rather not know how something ends, a study conducted by the psychology department at the University of California at San Diego found that people actually enjoy books and movies more when they know what's coming.

In light of the recent Jonah Lehrer scandal, Craig Silverman considers the warning signs that suggest that a promising young journalist is developing dangerous habits.

HTMLGiant presents The New York Review of Tweets—a succinct roundup of all the Twitter feeds worth paying attention to, with tag lines like this one: “If you miss dropping acid and fucking on roofs, you should follow Santino Dela. If you want to go to jail for the revolution, but, like, not leave your house, this is the feed for you.”

It’s the million-dollar question: Is R. Kelly kidding? “In his twenty-year exploration of the limits of the R. & B. sex ballad, R. Kelly has often toed the line between satiric and satyric,” Andrew Marantz writes at the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog. To get to the bottom of things, Marantz reads the rapper’s ghost-written autobiography, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, and notes that while the book does offer some revealing biographical details, it’s more fun for its “sublimely campy trash talk.”

Nick Ripatrazone exhorts MFA grads who don’t want to be adjunct professors to try their hand at teaching high school.

Former NBA player Dennis Rodman has authored a children’s book titled Dennis the Wild Bull, which, from the looks of it, is at least somewhat autobiographical.