The butler diploma

The market for super-butlers (underlying link here).

Mail order

Economics of the dark web. (Shades of Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel!)

The state of publishing

At the Guardian, Sam Leith argues that we're living in a golden age for the university press. I agree with everything he says - also I want to read some of these UP books he singles out for praise (might have to read a manuscript for the U of Chicago P so that I can get these for free - often honorarium from a press is a choice of a very modest sum of actual dollars or twice that amount in books! The Francis Barber book is already on my list and I am about to go and get it from the library):

In natural history and popular science, alone, for instance: Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell’s amazing book The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins or Brooke Borel’s history of the bedbug, Infested, or Caitlin O’Connell’s book on pachyderm behaviour, Elephant Don, or Christian Sardet’s gorgeous book Plankton? All are published by the University of Chicago. Beth Shapiro’s book on the science of de-extinction, How to Clone a Mammoth? Published by Princeton. In biography, Yale – who gave us Sue Prideaux’s award-winning life of Strindberg a couple of years back – have been quietly churning out the superb Jewish Lives series. Theirs is the new biography of Stalin applauded by one reviewer as “the pinnacle of scholarly knowledge on the subject”, and theirs the much-admired new life of Francis Barber, the freed slave named as Dr Johnson’s heir. Here are chewy, interesting subjects treated by writers of real authority but marketed in a popular way. The university presses are turning towards the public because with the big presses not taking these risks, the stuff’s there for the taking.

"Fringed with Ducks"

At the FT, Edward Posnett's prizewinning essay on the eiderdown in Iceland (site registration required).

Markets in everything

The phone storage business in NYC.

A whole new breed of cat person

The economy of internet cat videos.

Homecoming

Very happy to be safely home in New York with little cat Mickey. London was excellent, but extremely tiring; my cousin P.'s wedding was lovely in every respect, but my favorite part was pretty certainly seeing the bride and groom ride on camels down the Kings Road! (Picture courtesy of Georgina.)

Kate Atkinson's new novel is stunningly good, but I am too tired to write more about it now (but read it!); the flight home passed very quickly, too, as I was able to get Mark Billingham's new Thorne book (not out yet in the US) and Mo Hayder's Poppet (which I see now I could have had on US Kindle after all, but it is traditional to acquire a few large-format UK crime-fiction paperbacks at Heathrow), which carried me very nicely through the journey.

Closing tabs

Abandoned swimming pools.

At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on two new Keats biographies, with interesting more general thoughts on the literary biographer's dilemma.

Emily DePrang on what happened to one man put on Texas's sex offender registry for an offence committed when he was twelve. (And sequel.)

How to create cartoons.

Honey laundering. (Courtesy of B.)

Closing tabs

Miscellaneous minor linkage:

Larry McMurtry and the used book market.

Alan Garner's life in books.

Dry mammals.

Blind alleys

An outtake from the last piece I wrote for Bookforum, on money and the novel:

Crime fiction may be the contemporary subgenre where financial crises are most extensively and evocatively registered: Alan Glynn’s recent thrillers Winterland and Bloodland offer a particularly vivid and chilling account of the human fallout of the European financial collapse in Ireland. J. K. Rowling has written a string of novels that made her wealthier than the Queen of England, but the Harry Potter books aren’t themselves particularly interested in money, aside from occasional evocative glimpses of the contents of the vaults in Gringotts Wizarding Bank. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games books explore the drama of economic inequality without establishing the actual fiscal underpinnings of the economy she depicts, and when a popular contemporary writer does choose to describe the financial system in more complex detail, it’s usually to lambaste the moral failings markets are supposed to induce in those who trade. In Robert Harris’s The Fear Index, a British hedge fund manager creates a complex set of trading algorithms whose destructive potential exceeds that of Frankenstein’s monster: Don’t try this at home! Vampires in the Twilight books and elsewhere are popularly supposed to be well positioned to accumulate vast wealth owing to their longevity; perhaps, too, their natural affinity with the one percent is instanced in their well-known preference for formal wear.

Closing tabs

No Pulitzer for fiction this year.  It wasn't a suitable shortlist, I think: only one 'real' novel, the other two of the three were a reprinted novella from almost ten years ago and a posthumously cobbled-together book.  It is an oddity of group decision-making that this sort of situation can easily lead to a deadlock, especially when two different groups are responsible for the shortlist and the final determination.

Pitching a 33 1/3 book. (Via.) I've long had a yen to write one of these, but I have too many other projects lined up already, I think.

One of the 'places of power' for my novel rewrite: I will have to see what I can do with this.

I want this book!  (Phenomenon of really useful out-of-print books = prohibitive pricing; I will get it from the library....)

Last but not least: Japanese penguin goes shopping!

Light reading catch-up

I hadn't really intended to, but in effect I am clearly taking the weekend off (tomorrow I have ambitious exercise plans and am also meeting my dad for lunch and the matinee of Nico's ballet)....

Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!

Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).

I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.

Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.

"Perfectly good at it"

How much does it cost to make a hit song?

(NB not sure how much marketing had to do with it, but this Rihanna song has been played at something near to 100% of all spin classes I've attended in the last year!)

Sleeping with one eye open

Is a weak dollar the best thing for American rock'n'roll?  (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Cult pork

McRib as arbitrage strategy?

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

Pitches, splits

This is more immediately interesting from a writer's than a reader's standpoint, but I was interested by Emily Witt's Observer piece on the rise of the short non-fiction ebook.

Snowdrop skullduggery

At the FT, Joe Sharman tells Sarah Deguid about the amazing life of the galanthophile (site registration required):

Security is a big problem. This year the National Trust tagged its snowdrops at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. I know people who have opened their gardens and had everything stolen. If I have something new, I keep quiet. I have pulled the heads off flowers to stop people recognising them. I don’t open my garden or nursery. I never let people in. I don’t even tell people where I am. I always give one bulb away to a friend for security so that I can start again if things go missing. But stealing snowdrops is like stealing a Van Gogh. If it’s rare, all the galanthophiles will know who propagated it and where it was stolen from. You could only ever sell it in an ad at the back of a newspaper, if that.

The best possible images

Interesting piece by John Gapper at the FT about why Annie Leibovitz's pictures don't sell for as much money as Richard Avedon's (site registration required).