- Wow, Sheila Williams is really tired of exploding spaceships. An interesting, if not exactly surprising, talk with the editors of F&SF, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons about breaking out of the slush pile. The best advice I can offer? At the very least, don’t make the same mistakes as everybody else. Make more interesting mistakes. [via]
- “Banksy’s animatronic hot-dogs have sparked complaints from people ‘unhappy about seeing two hot-dogs performing a sex act’, he said.” Hmph. Some people!
- I want Cookie Monster to answer all of my spam, too!
- You know, I don’t usually drool over library porn…but wow. [via]
- Man, if I knew that was all it cost to buy TV Guide, I might have ponied up the dollar myself. Then again, as much as I like Matt Roush, I can’t really feel too sorry for the magazine’s recent steady slide into irrelevancy.
- Think there’s nothing more terrifying that outfitting police officers with Tasers? Try portable pain rays. [via]
- “We tend to reserve special roles for our favorite writers,” writes Slate‘s Christopher Benfey, “—sepulchral Poe; sardonic Mark Twain; sexy, world-embracing Walt Whitman—and resist evidence that contradicts our cherished images.” I’m reminded of little things, like readers upset when Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past was re-translated as In Search of Lost Time — even though that’s the correct title in French — or when the first line of Sartre’s The Stranger was “Americanized” — even though, again, that translation is probably more accurate. Anyway, turns out Emily Dickinson may not have been the chaste young spinster we imagine her to be. But I’m sure people will continue imagining her to be.