“In 2008, single, childless women between ages 22 and 30 were earning more than their male counterparts in most U.S. cities.”

Some new census data is showing that the gender gap has not only slowed but reversed in this very small segment of the population.

Before you start celebrating that this is the beginning of the end of wage inequality, however, take a look at some of these analyses, which show this might not be such a good sign after all.

(Thanks to Orion Elenzil for the title.)

“The person I was at that time died.”

— Maricela Guzman, an activist and rape survivor who is working to stop the plague of sexual assaults against women in the U.S. military. At Guernica, she is profiled by Courtney E. Martin. Seriously, read this article.

Also, be sure to check out this interview with Staff Sergeant Lisa Rose here at The Rumpus.

“The rise of dystopias has enabled what amounts to a new form of propaganda. And it’s a new form of propaganda that is particularly dangerous because we find ourselves so entertained by its message that we’re reluctant to give it up. The Devil’s greatest trick was not to convince us he didn’t exist; it was to make us enjoy the thing that would destroy us.”

At Bookslut, “Jurassic Park and the Utopia Wars” by JC Hallman.

It’s Labor Day weekend, which we get, partially, because the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals killed and injured a bunch of workers while breaking a strike and then Grover Cleveland felt bad about it. Or he was scared. One of the two. Now you can’t say you didn’t learn something today.

Now, book blogs!

This dude Lane Smith wrote a book about what a book is for people who forgot or never knew or something. (via)

Hey if you’re a Dune nerd the Dune encyclopedia, which has been out of print forever, is back because of the Internets.

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson went around the country fixing typos on street signs. (via)

People sad bookstore going out of business after not buying books at bookstore. (via)

Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone! Here’s what Rumpus Books has been up to this week.
…more

“Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one.”

— At The Boston Globe, an interview with Andrew Pettegree on how it took people a very long time to figure out the business of publishing after the invention of the printing press.

He also tells the story of how Gutenberg himself was thrown out of the printing press business by his partner because he kept losing money printing Bibles.

It’s that time again: here’s some very short nonfiction that’ll only take a minute to read but that will make you feel something.

“Connie was albino, exceptionally white even by the ultra-Caucasian standards of our southern suburb. Only her eyelids had color: mouse-nose pink, framed by moth-white lashes and brows.” — At Brevity, “White Lies” by Erin Murphy.

“Had God not become an extremist, tipping the scales, there would still exist today an equiponderant balance between what you might consider good and evil.” — At elimae, “Jesus was Cute” by Kim Teeple.

“I shared my first kiss with two boys, best friends.” At Eclectica, “Kissing in Tandem” by Valerie Fioravanti.

“On each day she was supposed to write a reason to live.” At The Collagist, “Light” by Michael Palmer.

I’m always looking for journals with a web presence that publish excellent flash nonfiction. If you know of any good sites I might be missing, put a note in the comments section or send me an email.

“My favorite band is Iron Maiden and I hate Reagan, and hippies, and Jesus.”

Via Westword, I came across Crud Wizard, a nine year-old’s metal blog.

His dad is helping him, and that’s pretty obvious, but his voice still comes through loud and clear. For example, his review of Don’t Break the Oath by Mercyful Fate kicks some serious ass.

“The music is plainly metal, played well to make it sound much more complicated than it is. Sometimes it makes me picture someone doing a pole vault, and sometimes it makes me think of ninjas. The cover art, I’m guessing, is somebody hell-related like Satan pointing and saying “Don’t break the oath or I will eat you, weakling.” If you do not own this album you’re totally missing out on some awesome music.”

Actually, all of his reviews kick ass.

I don’t usually take single photographic links and make one post out of them, but sometimes something is so freakin’ cool…

From 1909 to 1912, the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was given a crap-ton of money by the Tsar Nicholas II to go take pictures with a fancy camera that could take black and white photos in a way in which they could later be turned into color photos.

Incredibly high quality color photos.

It kind of feels like I’m looking at ghosts.

“But there’s a more pressing issue at hand: after little Joshua—the story’s grinning, crapping hero—learns where to drop his bombs, he does not once wear pants.”

— At The Millions, Jacob Lambert laments the subversive nature of Once Upon a Potty and other children’s picture books.

Maybe you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can refuse to sell it if it features Alexander the Great’s butt.

Ron Charles wants to tell you about how to make a hip book review. (via)

The LA Times has a literary tour of New Orleans for you. (via)

Electric Lit has a cool new one sentence animation of Patrick DeWitt’s short story.

Roy Peter Clark on how grammar is really magic. This is a really good interview.

It’d be a good idea to click on where it says “…more.” Rumpus Books kind of kicked ass this week. …more

Hello there, world. Had a crap week, and now the man is making me work on the Lord’s day, so I’ll see you all next Sunday! —Seth

Google, “locavore” movement mean local independent bookstores might even be thriving, per Reuters. (via)

Speaking of independent bookstores, it can get ugly when they fight. (via)

At The Guardian, The Wankh award celebrates the world’s smuttiest book titles, like Drummer Dick’s Discharge.

An interview worth checking out with David Mitchell over at NPR. (via)

Below the fold, come see what Rumpus Books has been up to this week. …more

Q: What happens when you videotape yourself getting a speeding ticket, especially from an unmarked cop who looks like Pee Wee Herman, wields a gun and doesn’t immediately identify himself?

A: You get sued for violating wiretap laws.

What?

Sunday is your day to see what Rumpus books was up to this week. It’s been up to a lot.

A review of Dead Ahead, a poetry collection by Ben Doller.

A review of Serious Men, a novel by Manu Joseph.

Return Them To Their Sources Uninterpreted — A review of Lovely, Raspberry, poetry by Aaron Belz.

The Silent Women — A review of The Genius and the Goddess, Jeffrey Meyers’ new chronicle of the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller.

A review of The Tiki King, a short story collection by Stacey Tintocalis.

Be sure not to miss this wonderful review/essay on The God of Small Things.

Our own Stephen Elliott’s starting a special Jonathan Franzen One-Off Book Club.

Also, here’s some amazing Rumpus interviews with Allison Hoover Bartlett and Neela Vaswani.

“To trace anybody’s work, what they produce, what they put into the world, what you or I respond to, to somebody’s life, their biography, is utterly reductionist. Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea they can be moved, they can be threatened, they can be thrilled by something that is just made up.

John Irving, the novelist, once said to me, “You know why that is? It’s because people who don’t have an imagination are terrified of people who do.” I don’t know if that’s true, but we live in culture of the memoir, where we’re not supposed to believe anything unless it’s documented that it actually happened. Never mind that most memoirs are more fictional than novels. … Whereas with art, whether music, movies, novels, painting, ultimately, to be moved by art, by something somebody has made up, is, from a certain perspective, to be tricked. To be fooled. You made me cry, and you just did it like you hypnotized me. I love that. Not everybody does.”

Andrew Sullivan points to a brilliant interview with music critic Greil Marcus over at 3 Quarks Daily.

“A hormonal treatment to prevent ambiguous genitalia can now be offered to women who may be carrying such infants. It’s not without health risks, but to its critics those are of small consequence compared with this notable side effect: The treatment might reduce the likelihood that a female with the condition will be homosexual. Further, it seems to increase the chances that she will have what are considered more feminine behavioral traits.”

Some days I want to move to another planet, or maybe pretend to be a bonobo instead of a human.

“(W)hile science fiction as a genre does very well with the general public in the film and television media, there’s still resistance to getting a mainstream fiction reader to allow themselves to be seen with a science fiction book that’s explicitly presented as science fiction (as opposed to the camouflaged science fiction of The Road or Never Let Me Go).”

Over at TOR, John Scalzi uses Heinlein’s publication in The Saturday Evening Post in the 40′s to kick up quite a discussion about whether science fiction writers should meet non-science fiction readers half-way.

I know we linked to this yesterday, but I just love this idea so much: Roxane Gay at GIANT is proposing a Literary Magazine Club.

The Rocky Mountain Land Library near Denver looks like it might be the best library ever.

Via Bookninja, Long Beach has installed public boxes where you can submit your poetry in the hopes that it will boost both creativity and coffee sales.

You know what? Speaking of Bookninja, I pilfer links from them all the time, and I don’t know if I’ve ever given them proper credit. So here, officially, I declare that Bookninja is awesome, hilarious, and an excellent source for book news I can’t find anywhere else (Also, Canadian!). You should go read them.

And finally, Yahoo is creating a style manual for writing on the web in order to “conquer the sprawling Internet”. That should do it.

As always, here’s some very short stories that’ll only take you a few moments to read but that made me feel something and hopefully will do the same for you.

“The messages most people send are very simple.” — At jmww, “April 1854: Richard Word, 30” by Brian Kiteley.

“Maybe by now, dissolved in your piano, occupied by the sound of a tic. Though you’d say it was tac. If I told you that, you’d laugh and remind me how I know you.” — At Corium Magazine, “Choo and Rumble” by Kim Chinquee.

“What the cabin lacked in furniture, it made up for in cobwebs and kudzu.” — At Smokelong Quarterly, “A Fistful of Buttercups” by Nancy Stebbins.

“A kid can’t hurt me, he says.” — At Pindeldyboz, “Villa Monterey Apartment, Burbank” by Meg Pokrass.

“They yank off their shirts and shove each other and lick tears off of flushed cheeks. They imagine cutting off Dude’s fingers and wearing them around their necks on strips of linen.” — At Necessary Fiction, “The Architecture of Two Closets in America” by Dawn West.

These are Anton Chekhov’s last words, and the Guardian has a slideshow of some sometimes funny, sometimes chilling last words of quite a few literary figures.

(And while we’re talking about slideshows, I’d actually recommend the Jacket Copy write-up instead of the Guardian’s, because slideshows drive me freakin’ bonkers. Slideshows are for photography only, people. PHOTOGRAPHY!)

Among some other great ones:

“What’s that? Do I look strange?” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“I must go in. The fog is rising.” — Emily Dickinson

“I feel certain that I’m going mad again.” — Virginia Woolf

“There’s nothing typical or simple about Roberge’s characters or scenes, but his sentences are sharp and clean. He makes basketball sound like Beethoven. Women are hot PhD-wielding topless house cleaners as well as brilliant basketball stars with wrenches who know how to jimmie a broken starter.”

Over at Annotation Nation, Rumpus Recession Sex Workers columnist Antonia Crane writes a glowing and thoughtful annotation of Rumpus contributor Rob Roberge’s novel Drive.

This week, Rumpus Books was off-the-hook, and it featured Narcissus and space chimps and Duran Duran, just to get you started. …more

“To dispel myths immediately, (Connecticut Attorney General Candidate) Gerry (Garcia) is not the reincarnated lead singer from the Grateful Dead, though he is a fan of the ice cream and frequently wears the ties that bear his name.”

— From the candidate’s web site.

According to Poor Sap Publishing, the Democrat is embracing his almost-namesake, complete with tie-die mailers and guitars in his TV ads. I don’t even like The Grateful Dead, but God I hope it works. I can already see the hordes of political consultants going through phone books trying to recruit Joan Jet and Jimmy Paige to run for office.

“Senate unable to get enough Republican votes to honor To Kill a Mockinbird.”  (via)

The Literary Saloon takes on the NYTBR for its lack of reviews of works in translation.

“William Faulkner: Every time a sentence goes on for more than a page, drink the entire bottle. Then make out with your sister.” Jezebel has a bunch of drinking games for reading various writers. WARNING: All of them will kill you. (via)

“(S)aying that chick-lit can’t be well-written is a little like saying that pretty girls can’t be smart.” At The Guardian, a defense of chick-lit by Michele Gorman.