Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: the perfect gift for people who don’t think they like genre fiction The best Latin name for your little toe is porcellus plorans domum, lit. piglet crying homeward; porcellus fori, domi, carnivorus and nonvoratus are left as an exercise for the reader Hard-nosed advice on how book publishing works (and something I wish I’d read before starting the process) from Mark Hurst Seeing to the “Dark Knight” with someone who rants about tardive dyskinesia and how it’s mean to pick on the mentally ill Rediscovering that A Pattern Language is a wonderful cult, an architecture book that solves the problems of the world, like Ayn Rand for grownups Sure, a minus sign isn’t the same as a hyphen or an en dash, but ditto marks are different from double quotes. Who knew? The new (and superb) Mountain Goats album Heretic Pride and especially its comic-book press kit The cunning laser printer trick of sticking a little piece of tape over the toner sensor to get 1000 or so more copies–sticking it to the Man indeed Kate Atkinson’s crime fiction: funny, novelistic, rich in character, full of ludicrous coincidence–everything crime fiction isn’t supposed to be And lightning shot in slow motion, more awesome than I can describe.