[Nanowrimo]
National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) begins again tomorrow. I won last year and highly recommend it for anyone who ever imagined there might be a book in them.

[Distributed Proofreaders]
Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. Volunteer to help proofread texts to make them available to the public faster.

[The New York Times]
By estimates from several conservationists, former landowners and opposition politicians, as many as two-thirds of the animals on Zimbabwe's game farms and wildlife conservancies have been wiped out, the product of three years of economic collapse, corruption and decaying civil order in a nation where the government is encouraging squatters and political allies to seize commercial farms and game preserves.

[The Christian Science Monitor]
About one-fourth of Americans now live alone. As their numbers grow, these singles are becoming a significant cultural and economic force. In 1940, less than 8 percent of Americans lived alone. Today that proportion has more than tripled, reaching nearly 26 percent. Singles number 86 million, according to the Census Bureau, and virtually half of all households are now headed by unmarried adults.

[Yahoo! News]
There are now 26.7 million women aged 15 to 44 who are childless in the U.S., a record number, according to new Census Bureau data from a June 2002 survey. They represent nearly 44 percent of women in that age group. The number of women 15 to 44 forgoing or putting off motherhood has grown nearly 10 percent since 1990, when roughly 24.3 million were in that class.

[The Simple Living Network]
TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY is a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

[Amazon.com]
Amazon.com debuts new service: searching the text of the books they sell.

[Slate]
Mother Teresa beatified? We witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

[New York Times]
Underground restaurants in people's homes and other unregulated spaces: public health hazard or casual environments for socializing and artistic creation?

[New York Times]
Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. We think it's frightening, and it's wrong, that the same American textbooks our stores buy here for $100 can be shipped in from some other country for $50, said Laura Nakoneczny, a spokeswoman for the National Association of College Stores. It represents price-gouging of the American public generally and college students in particular.

[E! Online]
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted on Saturday to cancel their 2003 awards, which often serve as a harbinger for Oscar nominations and a launching pad for lower-profile films, in order to protest the Motion Picture Association of America's decision to ban screeners for Hollywood award voters.

[Entrepreneur.com]
7-Eleven is installing new "hot beverage stations" which will provide customers with a choice of more than 1,300 combinations. A minimum of five varieties of coffee, four flavored syrups, seven different tea bags, five toppings, creamers, sweeteners and all types of milk will be available at each station. The drinks will cost about $1 per cup instead of the typical coffeehouse prices hovering between $3 and $4.

[multiple links]
Author DBC Pierre has won the 2003 Booker Prize for his first novel, black comedy Vernon God Little. Pierre is the pen name of Peter Warren Finlay, an Australian who has ripped off people in various parts of the world.

[Business Week]
The U.S. Census Bureau's newest numbers show that married-couple households have slipped from nearly 80% in the 1950s to just 50.7% today. That means that the U.S.'s 86 million single adults could soon define the new majority. Already, unmarrieds make up 42% of the workforce, 40% of home buyers, 35% of voters, and one of the most potent—if pluralistic—consumer groups on record.

[NY Sun]
If modernist design ideology promised efficiency, rationality, and truth, writes Virgina Postrel, today's diverse aesthetics offer a different trifecta: freedom, beauty, and pleasure. Thus do we live in a momentary—often delightful—chaos that shall inevitably morph into better practices through trial and error. Eventually, aesthetic harmony shall prevail.

[multiple links]
Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi becomes the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

[University of Maryland]
The evolution of alphabets.

[Geocities site]
The rejection of Pascal's Wager.

[The MacArthur Foundation]
2003 MacArthur "genius grant" recipients.

[Slate]
The immorality of the Ten Commandments.

[The Chronicle of Higher Education]
The 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to John Maxwell Coetzee.

[Publishers Weekly]
Borders Group wants publishers to stop putting prices on books and plans to begin working, in cooperation with publishers, toward that goal next year.

[Washington Post]
A high school student has the right to wear a T-shirt to school with the face of President Bush and the words "International Terrorist" on the front, a federal judge ruled.

[Sydney Morning Herald]
The MPAA bans the free disbursement of films on video and DVD as a marketing or awards awareness technique. The ban announced by the Motion Picture Association of America this week was prompted by piracy worries. But the ruling was quickly denounced for favouring the big studios over the smaller independents, which have come to dominate the Oscars in recent years and which rely on DVDs and videotapes to get awards voters to see their films.