[TechCrunch]
Disney to acquire Marvel Entertainment for $4 Billion.

[Nina Siegal]
How many bestsellers become literary classics?

[Islands.com]
Find your island.

[The Wall Street Journal]
This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.

[Wired]
Technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

[NPR]
Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children's show in PBS history — outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read...

[Orion Magazine]
Rebecca Solnit: The Four Horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons.

[Times Online]
Richard Dawkins: People who reject the theory of evolution should be placed on a level with Holocaust deniers.

[BBC]
There seem to be an awful lot of books these days where the author shows their power of endurance by doing something odd for a year. But why?

[The Longest Poem in the World]
The "longest poem in the world," created by aggregating real-time public twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme.

[Intelligent Life]
None of the greatest western philosophers has produced a proper guide for today's enlightened hedonist.

[Slate]
Christopher Hitchens: If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them…and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

[Swindle]
A daily aggregator of contemporary poetry.

[Online College]
101 tools that can help you learn a new language without spending a dime on tuition.

[FORA.tv]
We gather the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences. We present this provocative, big-idea content for anyone to watch, interact with, and share.

[Gallup]
The states of the union differ remarkably from one another in terms of their residents' religions.

[The New York Times]
All-purpose pronoun.

[Telegraph.co.uk]
Archaeologists have discovered what they believe is man's earliest map, dating from almost 14,000 years ago.

[Bookseller.com]
Supermarkets now sell one in every five books bought in the UK, according to market share data.

[CNN]
The U.S. military did major damage to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient world, while converting it into a base, says the United Nations in a new report.