More, including video clips for each item here.

High lights from the August 13 issue of The New York Review of Books include:

"The News About the Internet, By Michael Massing

The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.

Health Reform: The Fateful Moment, By Theodore R. Marmor and Jonathan Oberlander

Obama has decided to "throw long" and push for bold health reform this year. Yet as Congress drafts legislation, there are profound divisions over how to pay for reform and how necessary it is to attract Republican support. And although nearly three-quarters of Americans favor a Medicare-like public insurance option, the question of a public plan has emerged as the most contentious issue, dividing most Democrats from nearly all Republicans, as well as conservative from liberal Democrats.

Iran: The Tragedy & the Future, By Roger Cohen

The least that could be said, in the sunny morn after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's emphatic reelection as president of Iran, was that festivities of the kind associated with a victory by two thirds of the vote were on hold, discarded in favor of a putsch-like lockdown. A central question over the coming months will be whether the president and the Supreme Leader can tough it out in an atmosphere of near martial law.

Rape of the Congo, By Adam Hochschild

For two weeks in June, I had the chance to observe the effects of more than a decade of a bewilderingly complex civil war in eastern Congo. No one has been harder hit than Congo's women, for almost all the warring factions have used rape as a calculated method of sowing terror.

Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery, By Mary Beard

Instantly recognizable with its squat red columns, ceremonial staircases, and "throne rooms," Knossos is the second most visited of all archaeological sites in Greece, attracting almost a million visitors each year. Yet none of those columns are ancient; they are all restorations, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Sir Arthur Evans, the British excavator."

James Campbell in The UK Times unearths the real Raymond Carver

"How an editor’s pencil created an author’s literary style - and how an author’s wife has undone it. Raymond Carver wrote several drafts of each of his poems and short stories, “cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone”. His stories, in particular, bear the traces of unending polish, of “putting words in and taking words out”. In the lives of most of Carver’s characters, history refers to a time when they were better or worse off, happier or unhappier, drinking more or less, than they are now. The narrative method of his early work was situated squarely in the tradition derived from Ernest Hemingway, deploying plain vocabulary, short sentences, the repetition of certain words and phrases, and above all the concealment of essential facts so as to implant a timed explosive in the reader’s imagination. Carver was Hemingway (most of whose fiction is located abroad) transposed to the blue-collar American margins, populated by men and women who seldom think about the world beyond - a land of bad marriages, cramped living rooms, truculent children, and unharnessed addictions of the old-fashioned sort.

The pleasure of reading Carver, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty, derives partly from his bizarre scenarios and from absurdist dialogue which yet retains the quality of overheard conversation; equally, it comes from pace and phrasing, even paragraphing and punctuation, which the author controls with what are practically musical skills. In the early stories, there is often an ambiguity in a line of speech, or a cloud over the action, which ultimately contributes to the reader’s thrill of engagement. “Why Don’t You Dance?”, the opening story of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), describes a “yard sale” and a couple’s purchase of bed, desk, record player and other items from the “old guy” who has dragged his house furnishings outside in the hope of raising some cash. Near the end, he and the young woman dance to a dated tune, while her drunken boyfriend lies on the open-air bed, asleep." More here.

Are all libraries petri dishes of simmering lust? A case study of the British Library examined by the UK Times

"All libraries are, of course, petri dishes of simmering lust, but the British Library is extreme: its walls contain more erotic pressure than an oil rig, a North Sea fishing trawler and several series of Mad Men combined. And it turns out that I’m not alone in thinking so. In 2005, Olivia Stewart-Liberty reported in The Spectator that “the whole building sighs with hothouse groans, which swell and fade to muffle other sounds”; in 2006 a gay website exposed the British Library as a cottaging ground and the regular BL readers who I’ve discussed it with concur.

Not that we can agree as to why. Explanations put forward include: the intrinsic erotic appeal of women in pencil skirts, stockings and Sarah Palin spectacles telling you off; the intrinsic filthiness of all librarians (after all, Casanova was one); the enforced silence and bookish atmosphere, which conspire to make you want to do something loud and physical in response; the safety (the theory goes that people feel free to flirt without feeling obliged to take things farther); the presence of books, which after all, are intrinsically sexy and have been connected to seduction for hundreds of years; the unexpected corners.

More here.

Brit ons to send 130 million summer postcards

Steve Keenan in the UK Times writes "Far from being wiped out by text and email, the tradition of postcards will hit new peaks says research. In a world of email, text and Twitter, the tradition of sending friends and family a postcard will hit a new peak this summer, say new figures. A survey of 3,000 adults by the Association of British Travel Agents (Abta) finds that more than half say sending a postcard is an "important part of British and family travel culture. Many combine old and new communications, with 71 per cent using text to keep in touch with friends and family at home." Check out the illustrations here.

The UK Guardian profiles Australian author Shaun Tan's new book

"The author of some of the most startling graphic stories of recent years is not what you'd expect of an artist, but then his are not your typical picture books. In the stunning, wordless graphic novel The Arrival, sober-looking characters dressed in 1930s-style suits and bowler hats are accompanied on their journeys through a mysterious city by strange creatures reminiscent of Philip Pullman's daemons (only much, much weirder). The Lost Thing is a huge metal contraption from some other world, "hidden" by the boy who finds it in his parents' otherwise relatively conventional house; next to the words "nobody understands", the central character in The Red Tree is seen wearing a weighty diving mask, huddled in a glass bottle on a stormy shoreline, in one of the most unnerving insights into depression ever drawn."

More here.

Nich olson Baker's New Yorker article 'Can the Kindle really improve on the book?', has only been out a week, but already generated much blog controversy. His long article includes the words "the paperback edition of “The Lincoln Lawyer” ($7.99 at Sherman’s in Freeport) has a bright-green cover with a blurry photograph of a car on the front. It says “MICHAEL CONNELLY” in huge metallic purple letters, and it has a purple band on the spine: “#1 New York Times Bestseller.” On the back, it says, “A plot that moves like a shot of Red Bull.” It’s shiny and new and the type is right, and it has the potent pheromonal funk of pulp and glue. When you read the book, its gutter gapes before your eyes, and you feel you’re in it. In print, “The Lincoln Lawyer” swept me up. At night, I switched over to the e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster and faster.

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks."

More here.

The UK Times has some poignant ancedotes on the "dress circle of hell"

"From the clinking of charm bracelets to unsociable snores, you have seen it all in the stalls of Britain’s theatres.

The young, the old, the sick. Crisps, coughing, snoring. Blind people, deaf people, bangles. Raw vegetables. A theatre audience of Times readers is a tough crowd to please.

I sat beside a blind lady at the opera one night and her guide dog began snoring loudly just as Donizetti's Lucia was singing (lustily!) her last breath. The resultant ripple of concealed laughter did not quite spoil the end.

Warren Luke

By far the most devastating incident I have experienced in four decades of theatregoing was on March 30 at the New London Theatre, when, with most of the audience settled in the stalls, a woman wearing a knapsack made three passes along Row L, clouting those of us in row K on the head. As we turned to remonstrate, a toggle on the knapsack swung with some force into my wife’s left eye, resulting in a detached retina, emergency surgery and at least three months’ disruption of normal life.

John Coldstream".

More here.

Locu s magazine founder Charles N Brown dies

Science fiction fans have been saddened by the death of long-time science fiction fan and founder of the authoritative Locus magazine, the monthly news magazine of the SFF genre. Brown went like a true fan, on the journey back from science fiction con Readercon.

I met Brown at a US Publisher convention in Los Angeles in the early 1990s and contributed a couple of news articles at that time for Locus. He had many contacts in Australian fandom and the writing community here such as Bruce Gillespie and Sean McMullen.

Earliest P.G. Wodehouse satires discovered

The UK Guardian reported "the discovery of four satirical "playlets" by PG Wodehouse, seen by the public for the first time in 100 years this weekend, prove that the humorist - who is often viewed as apolitical - had a strong interest in public affairs from his youth." More here

ODD BOOK TITLE

Edward Samson. The World's Worst Teeth. Staples Press. 1962

Debbie Campbell from the National Library reports only one holding in Libraries Australia, at the University of Queensland. Maybe Kevin Rudd doesn't need a dental policy.