The Worst Slush Pile
Until recently in Romania, prisoners could reduce their sentences by thirty days for each “book of scientific value” they wrote while behind bars. Now one man, who went to prison for…
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liam o’brien
6 posts
Textbook Crisis in India Turns Violent
A massive delay in textbook printing in India’s southern state of Kerala has led to accusations of corruption in the government education ministry and violent protests. Government officials suggested schools print…
The Laws of War
Government documents aren’t exactly page-turners, making hefty tombs like the 74,000 page tax code and the 33,000 page Obamacare law unlikely additions to any summer beach reading lists. The 1,200…
Amazon: The Root of Book Littering?
The strange case of the “Literature Litterbug”—a mystery perp who’s been dumping used books along a Colorado highway for a year or more—has come to a close, bringing with it…
Books Save Lives
You know all those movies in which a character is shot in the chest, only to be miraculously saved by a pocket Bible, and everyone in the audience rolls their…
Author Roboto
At Melville House, Liam O’Brien delves into the fictional and factual history of book-writing computers, from Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” to the Russian computer that rewrote Anna Karenina…