With healthcare reform moving at such a sluggish rate, we’ve all become pretty exasperated by the worsening creases in Washington.

In the face of so much disagreement, thank goodness the environmental movement is so unified. Who in their right mind can disagree on the war on global warming?

Not so fast. Johann Hari has just written a provocative, if not controversial, piece in The Nation on the divide within the environmental movement. In “The Wrong Kind of Green,” Hari takes a stab at environmental organizations that receive money from corporations, many of which are among the largest transgressors in the war on environmental pollution.

“Imagine if Amnesty International was dependent, just to write human rights reports, on funding from Dick Cheney… …more

It’s that one day in the midst of dreary February that’s supposed to remind you to reach out to the one you love or lust after. But chances are you are either swinging solo or just sick of all the saccharine propaganda pouring from every storefront and supermarket display.

To get in a more appropriate mood for the day, we present to you the Choose Your Own Valentine’s Day Music Adventure Guide. Pick your pathway and throw all romantic pretenses out the window: …more

First there was the bitter move by Amazon to remove all Macmillan titles from its digital inventory after Macmillan demanded higher e-book pricing.

Then two more publishing houses publicly denounced Amazon’s dime a dozen approach to pricing e-books at $9.99. Now, in the latest installment in the tug-of-war over e-book prices, publishers have convinced online retailers to sell e-books on a varied scale, ranging from $12.99–$14.99.

But as the diligent New York Times reporters Motoko Rich and Brad Stone reveal, no one knows yet how consumers will react. Even if publishers have reason to celebrate their small triumph in e-book pricing, they will still have to struggle with the American readers’ complacency towards paying much for literature. “The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said author Douglas Preston in Rich and Stone’s article. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Read all sorts of perspectives about this past week’s e-book pricing ordeal by selecting from The Virginia Quarterly Review’s links.

Desperate to save their businesses, the private companies who sell loans to college students have been heavily lobbying the government to keep subsidizing their loan programs. A bill that will overhaul the private loan industry recently passed in Congress with clear support from President Obama, who stated in his recent State of the Union Address “no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.”

The new proposal would retract government subsidies to private lending companies and cap the amount students have to pay back every month to 10% of their salary if they make more than $16,245 a year, reports Bryan Gerhart in his article for the California News Service.  Loans that hadn’t been paid back after 10 years would even be forgiven if that student worked for a nonprofit or government organization. …more

Update: Amazon caves to Macmillan’s demands! Read on to learn more about the dispute:

After Macmillan Publishers challenged Amazon’s pricing of e-books for Kindle users, Amazon retaliated on Friday by pulling not only all e-books by Macmillan authors but also physical literature by the publisher as well.

Macmillan is a large international publishing house with smaller  presses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt under its wing. Macmillan’s decision to pressure Amazon to raise its prices for e-books  has caused Amazon to render its digital shelves purposefully bereft of books by authors like Jeffrey Eugenides and Hilary Mantel. …more

Not long ago Bloomsbury published author Justine Larbalestier’s novel Liar, which revolves around an African-American protagonist, with a white girl’s face on the cover. The choice was made against Larbalestier’s wishes and to the shock of many readers, and Bloomsbury eventually agreed to publish another edition with a cover model more in line with Liar’s protagonist’s appearance.

Astonishingly, Bloomsbury has just released yet another novel about a brown-skinned female with a white cover girl on its facade: Joclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass. In her article “Publisher whitens another heroine of color” for Salon, Kate Harding examines Bloomsbury’s rationale for whitewashing multiple book covers, and also delves into a shadowed publishing industry saturated with those who are convinced that “white sells.”

Harding illuminates the thoughts of several activists and writers, and points to the fact that “white sells” is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. For our culture to show its support of ethnic diversity in the content we read and images we buy, explains Harding, we must pressure our librarians and booksellers to amp up stock on cover art that supports our multi-faceted population.

“To me folk music is about storytelling, and opera is about storytelling, so there’s no contradiction at all.” …more

Thirty years have passed since Joan Didion composed The White Album, her book of essays about the unsettling thrills and shadows of 1970’s LA, and by now the book’s title might as well refer to the hair color of its many personalities.  Didion herself is seventy-five, and the era she wrote about has been eclipsed by the roaring nineties and disaster crazed ‘aughts.

But much of her insight remains relevant, writes Josh-Garrett Davis. In his essay “California Über Alles” written for The Faster Times, he deems The White Album “almost a book of Genesis for the period of American history” he’s lived through. As Garrett-Davis reflects on his own bildungsroman in California, he comes to see Didion’s book as the creation story of a post-60’s world, a world fraught with uncertainty, detachment, and moral ambiguity.

The Rumpus presents the second installment of an index to “The Last Book I Loved” Series. …more

The decision by voters in several states to ban gay marriage has more than ruffled the feathers of many gay rights activists. In a country where half of all marriages end in divorce, many argue that the traditional marriage “protected” in measures such as California’s Proposition 8 has been marred by millions of broken vows.

John Marcotte, a web designer in Sacramento, has taken protest of Prop 8 one step further by proposing a measure for the 2010 California ballot that would ban divorce in California. “Since California has decided to protect traditional marriage, I think it would be hypocritical of us not to sacrifice some of our own rights to protect traditional marriage even more,” Marcotte told the Associated Press.

Marcotte, who runs the comedy site BadMouth.net, has garnered support from more than just the gay community. His Facebook page has over 11,000 members, and he led a “ban divorce” rally at the Capitol building in Sacramento. Some supporters held signs that read: “You too can vote to take away civil rights from someone.”

Find out more about Marcotte and his measure by reading the Associated Press article “‘No Divorce’ Initiative Lampoons Gay Marriage Ban” on the NPR website.

Kaylie Jones, daughter of James Jones who penned From Here to Eternity, revealed in an interview with The Daily Beast that her father was forced to remove gay sex scenes from his original manuscript prior to publication.

Jones had originally included discussions and details about sexual favors and relationships between male soldiers, which were deemed too “salacious” for the American public. …more

On October 21^st, Jack Kerouac had been dead exactly forty years.

You’d be pressed to find a more quoted, misunderstood, revered, and culturally significant icon of the latter half of the 20^th century. Yet his literary contributions remain pretty controversial. As Guardian writer David Barnett points out in “Misremembering Jack Kerouac”: “The evidence against Kerouac is, on the face of it, overwhelming. As joyful as his lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose could be, it wasn’t, we are reminded, proper writing.” …more

Bibliophiles of the world, take note: if you are not an inhabitant of the Twin Cities, you could be missing a chance to put your literary acumen to practical use.

The literati of the “most literate city of 2008″ have banded together to create a literary scavenger hunt entitled Around the Literary Twin Cities in Almost Eighty Days, complete with lettered locales, limericks,  trivia, twists and turns, mystery clues, and loads of treasure for the patient and determine participants. …more

The author of a novel, who recommended it, how the cover is designed, and what awards it has won often sway readers into buying literature, but it’s not often that readers select books on the basis of who’s published them.  “Branding, the Future of Publishing?”, an article on Vroman’s Bookstore blog, examines the effect a publisher has on an author and his work.

While publishers may often be accused of stripping novels of their literary juice in favor of what sells, Vroman’s blogger Patrick makes a case for the importance of the publisher. He then goes on to propose that bookstores shelve by publisher rather than author-McSweeney’s and Featherproof earning their own shelves, as well as The New York Review Books Classics. While it may not be revolutionary, it’s certainly fascinating to think about.

Saying the word “journalism” these days is like openly inviting those around you to either deliver a lecture on the evils of technology, pontificate about the end of the written word, or expound on their emotional attachment to The New York Times.

Also on the list of hot journalism topics right now is the burgeoning number of nonprofit news organizations. Read Slate Magazine’s report on the new phenomenon, by Jack Schafer, and learn that San Francisco’s own Warren Hellman, founder of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, just committed $5 million to the Bay Area News Project and that MinnPost and Center for Independent Media, among others, are already up and running.

Schafer presents a bleak warning about such seemingly optimal publications: “For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately. No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions.” While for-profit publications strive to serve their consumer-driven readers, non-profit caters to cash-laden, and often do-gooder, donors who often have a lot of influence and agendas of their own to consider along with their funding.

At the beginning of Avenue Q, the Broadway Musical notorious for its puppets who say and do dirty things, the fresh-out-of-college Princeton glides onto the stage (as well as puppets can glide), assumes a singing position, and earnestly asks the audience: “What do I dooo with a B.A. in Engleeeeehsh?”

In his article for The American Scholar, “The Decline of the English Major,” William M. Chace observes how many students are wondering the very same thing. …more

The Department of Justice says nay to Google’s proposed Book Search deal.

Joni Evans discusses the essential tools of publishing over the decades in The New York Times‘ “When Publishing had Scents and Sounds.”

The publishing business might get a boost due to a recent Blockbuster Week. (via Powell’s Book Blog)

Oxford University Press releases the world’s largest thesaurus, twice the size of Roget’s.

Stuffed saber tooth tigers, fake neanderthals, and…books? A new exhibit at The Hispanic Society displays works of literature through dioramas based on their symbolism.

The recent Tides Momentum Leadership Conference featured innovators and activists from around the world passionate about discussing current challenges and striving to forge a more equitable and sustainable society.

One such activist, Mimi Chakarova, has spent an extensive amount of time as an undercover photojournalist documenting the lives of sex workers caught in the complicated web of sex trafficking and slavery. …more

Artist: Volcano Choir (with Bon Iver)

Song: “Island, IS”

What’s hipper than indie culture? Discussing whether or not indie culture still exists, of course.

In his essay for The Millions, “T.V. Party Tonight!,” Patrick Brown wonders about the reoccurring dichotomy between mainstream and alternative. In contrast to publishing consultant Richard Nash, who offers: “indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead,” Brown argues that a defined alternative to the mainstream culture still thrives, even if the line between indie and pop does look a bit blurrier.

This can be seen in the way we receive movies, music, and art more than how they are produced. Brown sees artists as having way more opportunities to self publish and promote than ever before.

But the consumption of certain songs or T.V. shows, for example, reveals how focused the nation is on eating up the same few subjects. Lesser known–and potentially more high-brow­–programming and artists still see weak turnouts and less media. The much-anticipated premier of Mad Men, for example, yielded only 2.8 million viewers in contrast to the rerun of Two and a Half Men, which drew 6 million more. Phew. We were worried that Mad Men had become too banal.

Brown concludes by urging us to focus on what art we admire rather than what art we deem indie.

Artist: The Wheel

Song: “My Hanging Surrender”

With the advent of a great novel comes a new and irrevocable universe its author has forged.  Even the most minuscule detail imagined–a street name, a painting, a work of fiction–becomes, for a number of pages, a reality. Fiction writers Levi Stahl and Ed Park, fascinated by the imagined novels they kept stumbling upon within their favorite works of literature, created the Invisible Library in order to catalogue these fictitious novels within novels. …more

Justine Larbalestier’s thriller Liar is told from the perspective of shifty Micah, an unreliable teen who describes herself as an African-American with short nappy hair. It’s no wonder that the public and even Larbalestier herself were shocked when Bloomsbury’s USA edition of the novel arrived sporting a pale, straight haired white girl on the cover. The novel hones in on the instability of the narrator and the possibility that she has committed several murders.

Larbalestier claims that she has been privately championing for a different cover. She told Publisher’s Weekly: “I love my publisher…[But] I never wanted this cover. I made it clear I didn’t want a white girl’s face. Having this cover on the front is undermining the book that I wrote.”

Bloomsbury has printed 100,000 copies of Larbalestier’s novel and is distributing them to bookstores across the world. Their choice for the American cover has called into question whether “white-washed” covers, as Larbalestier describes covers displaying white as opposed to minority faces, sell more copies in the US. As she describes in her blog, “Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers.”

But some readers defend Bloomsbury’s choice because they say it reflects Micah’s undependability and forces them to question whether she may be lying about her appearance as well. Whether or not this reflects Bloomsbury’s strategy, Larbalestier’s reaction to the cover of her own book reveals how little control writers have over the publicity of their work, not to mention how pervasive racism may still be in both the publishing and consumer worlds.

Muumuu House, an independent press edited by author Tao Lin, publishes not only poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, but also Gmail chats and Twitter selections on its starkly minimalist website.

Lin’s most recent book Shoplifting from American Apparel garnered mixed reviews from critics including Michael Schuab who called it “the funniest and saddest book I’ve read in a long time” on Bookslut.

Lin is known for his absurdist humor and Muumuu House is not simply his place to publish new work but also a clean white space, an online gallery of sorts, to display insightful but most likely irreverent content to fill the 4-6 month stretches between publishing new books.

So far, Muumuu House has come out with Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, by Ellen Kennedy, The Brandon Book Crisis, edited by Tao Lin and Brandon Scott Gorrell, and During My Nervous Breakdown I Want a Biographer Present, by Brandon Scott Gorrell.

In his piece for  the London Review of Books, “Berlusconi in Tehran,” about the danger of authoritarian power within democracies, Slavoj Zizek examines the possible similarities between the victorious Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

In light of the recent unsettling events in Tehran, Zizek challenges readers to confront the possible flaws in parliamentary representative democracy and cites Walter Lippman’s coined term ‘manufactured consent’ to describe democratic elections based on supposed free will.

According to Zizek, while voters in a democracy act as though they are free, they are still dependent on an elite to tell them what to do and think. In a sense, an election merely asks people to pretend that those in power aren’t already so and then to ‘freely’ grant them power again.

Unfortunately, this may mean that true democracy is losing power while authoritarian capitalism is gaining it. As Zizek sees it, just as Berlusconi may be ruling Italy with popular support, his actions have increasingly neglected democratic principles.

Midwest Dilemma’s Timelines and Tragedies combines resonant storytelling with genre-bending indie-folk music and a plethora of eclectic instruments. …more

The arrival of the Internet and the wide dissemination of information that ensued has inspired the belief that technology may be able to break down hierarchies and allow for the equal access to and expression of information.

In “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” a speech written for Personal Democracy Forum, Danah Boyd cautions against trusting in technology as an equalizer. As an ethnographer, Boyd interviewed American teens about their use of MySpace vs. Facebook and noticed that the results reflected many of the social stratifications that make up the non-digital world.

Race and affluence and education all made their way into the supposedly “neutral” realm of digital interaction. Boyd likens the abandonment of MySpace for Facebook to “white flight” where certain social groups leave an area to escape what they see as the riff-raff. As social categories become more defined and divided in the digital realm, people communicate less and less between each other and intolerance burgeons. Boyd urges his listeners to realize that current “social media networks” actually refer to spaces where people with similarities interact with people they already know, and that the utopic idea of a universal public online is a myth.

Cinema may face a far less foreboding fate than, say, our country’s print journalism, but the medium still seems to be undergoing a transformation. In Slate Magazine’s “Death by a Thousand Director’s Cuts,” Jonathan Rosenbaum reflects on the state of cinema in an age where people seem unsatisfied by original editions of material. Blade Runner, for instance, has been released eight times, each with different edits and revisions. Though Orson Welles once claimed about his own style: “editing is not an aspect, it is the aspect,” Rosenbaum seems to question whether the term “director’s cut” rightfully applies to many of edited versions of films, and whether creating more versions is necessarily better in the first place.

Allegedly founded in the 1950’s by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the Church of the SubGenius rose to infamy with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 by Reverend Ivan Stang and Dr. Philo Drummond in 1979. Attempts to classify the organization prove tricky, as the group’s mantra resists definition–the official website claims that “A True SubGenius, however, understands EVERYTHING, INSTANTLY upon exposure to the Word or even just the Face of Dobbs”– but in general the Church mocks organized religion and encourages the subversive, the underground, and most importantly, Slack, or freedom and independent thinking. Generally regarded as a joke of an organization that satirizes Evangelism and Scientology alike, the Church has still managed to recruit thousands of members who pay a $30 lifetime membership, which calls into question whether its followers agree with the Church’s farce or have come to seriously consider its “teachings”. Pee-wee Herman and David Byrne are among the Church’s most famous members. …more

At the start of his New York Magazine article, “In Defense of Distraction,” about the pros and cons of overstimulation, Sam Anderson tells us to pause from updating our Facebook and Twitter profiles, refreshing our e-mails, checking text messages, peeking at scores of the latest games, and to, in short, forget our digital crack and focus on what he is saying. What follows is an informative if not slightly meandering discussion of the debate over distraction, chock-full of meta-commentary about how distracted Anderson was while attempting to write the article. …more