Thirty months before there was Cast Lead, there was the Dahieh War, a sustained assault against Lebanon during which the Israeli military flattened an entire neighborhood of tightly packed high-rises in southern Beirut called simply “the Dahieh” (the suburb.) The vast majority of the 300,000 people who lived until then in the Dahieh had fled before the flattening began, finding shelter in other parts of Lebanon or in neighboring Syria. The inhabitants of Qana, in South Lebanon’s mountainous Jabal ‘Amel region, were not so “lucky”. On July 30, 2006, the Israeli military bombed a house in Qana in which scores of civilians had sought refuge: Some 60 of them were killed, including at least 19 children.

We are now approaching the fifth anniversary of that massacre in Qana. (Tragically, the village had suffered an eerily similar tragedy during a precursor Israeli assault, ten years earlier.)

Read more in Mondoweiss

The U.S. Department of Labor reports the unemployment rate is 9.2 percent nationwide. In Missouri it’s 10.3 percent. The problem continues. A.N.Y. Based Film crew is in St. Louis this week documenting the history and stories of the unemployed.

D.W. Gibson is one of those behind the film, “America Not Working” and David Greenwalt is from The Go Network, a St. Louis group trying to put people back to work. For more info, email dwmgibson@yahoo.com or visit their website, America Not Working.com

Watch DW Gibson on FOX 2 St. Louis

When we talk about global warming, much of the debate centers on separating facts from fluff, and environmental activist Bill McKibben wants to set the record straight. The Global Warming Reader, a book edited by McKibben and out this month from OR Books, pulls together seminal texts of the climate change debate, with the goal of creating a complete picture of what we know about global warming. Selections range from a 19th century treatise to images from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and include a few unexpected gems, like Senate floor statements from climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

I spoke to McKibben about his history with climate change literature, his ongoing battle against ExxonMobil, and, in the face of dismal environmental realities, how he avoids the temptation to curl up in a little ball on the floor.

Read the full interview on Grist

Start with The Dawn of Conscience by James Henry Breasted. It’s old, but then what it deals with is even older! It’s a brilliant introduction to ancient Egyptian life and thought – and its continued relevance today. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Saqi £14.95) by eminent Lebanese author Amin Maalouf is a great read. Take care though: it’s not the angle that western readers are used to. Everyone should read one Naguib Mahfouz novel. In English, Miramar is the one I’d go for.

Egypt: The Moment of Change (Zed £16.99) edited by Rabab El Mahdi and Philip Marfleet – this provides an excellent background and interpretation of today’s Egyptian revolution. Tweets from Tahrir edited by Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle will take you right up to the present and give you a sense of the Egyptian revolution as it unfolded.

Read the rest in The Guardian

From the moment she booked her flight Nadia Idle must have known that what she was doing was neither logical nor sensible. Why else tell only one friend? Why else e-mail her boss at War on Want only a few hours before take-off, unless she worried that the cool analysis of others might take the certainty out of the situation?

After two weeks of watching live television images from Tahrir Square, Idle, an Egyptian living in London, could view events from a distance no more. She had to be there. And so, on the night of February 7, she booked her flight and went, leaving only cursory crumbs to guide those who might wonder where.

Meanwhile, Alex Nunns, a writer, musician and political correspondent for Red Pepper magazine, watched in London. It wasn’t the live television footage from cameras stationed on top of buildings overlooking the square that transfixed him. It wasn’t the news reporters and network anchors who had flown from around the world, to set up camp on hotel balconies and describe events that, even then, seemed hardly credible.

What he found compelling were the words coming directly from the people in the square via Twitter. Their tweets offered an instant, emotional and personal connection.

Read more at The National

When we talk about global warming, much of the debate centers on separating facts from fluff, and environmental activist and Mother Jones contributor Bill McKibben wants to set the record straight. The Global Warming Reader, a book edited by McKibben and out this month from OR Books, pulls together seminal texts of the climate change debate with the goal of creating a complete picture of what we know about global warming. Selections range from a 19th-century treatise to images from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and include a few unexpected gems like Senate floor statements from climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

I spoke to McKibben about his history with climate change literature, his ongoing battle against ExxonMobil, and, in the face of dismal environmental realities, how he avoids the temptation to curl up in a little ball on the floor.

Read the full interview at Mother Jones

“Performance has always been at the heart of my work.” Eileen Myles projects up from the page, suspending language in a perpetually moving state. Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is a coming-of-age, coming out paean—animated, salty, and fresh. Whether she’s worshiping broadsides by Bill Knott or calling Patti Smith a “Romantic messy boy,” she presents the real underground.

From a working class Boston to the hip haunts of St. Mark’s, Myles’s “distracted” style exudes immediacy. Hanging with heroes or down and out on speed, she takes us, like Virgil, on an epic tour. Sex, drugs and rock and roll share the stage with bohemian Pulitzer Prize winners on a poet’s burning pilgrimage. Inferno is an avant classic of vintage instants (OR Books).

Read the entire article on The Brooklyn Rail

The Transom recently learned that Emily Gould—former employee of publishing house Hyperion, blogger at Gawker, memoirist, and New York Times Magazine cover-writer—is setting out on a venture with close friend Ruth Curry to sell e-books, online, through an e-tail site called Emily Books.

Readers with long memories and obsessive streaks might recall Ms. Curry as Ms. Gould’s supportive best friend in Ms. Gould’s New York Times Magazine cover story about life on the Internet. They shared a secret blog about relationships! And it was Ms. Curry who recently emailed publishers at OR Books, an independent publishing concern that prints books on demand and specializes in e-books. Company co-founder John Oakes told the Transom that Ms. Curry’s email read in part: “Our goal is to be super-specialized and targeted and to build an audience that trusts us.”

Read more at The New York Observer

As all aspects of book publishing become digitized, synthesized, and aggregated through metadata systems, it should come as no surprise that galleys are following suit—even the coveted advanced reader’s copies and uncorrected proofs of yore are taking on a new, digital form.

Carrying the torch in the e-galley revolution is NetGalley, a company owned by Firebrand Technologies, that helps facilitate and fulfill galley requests from site members by providing them with DRM-protected files authorized through Adobe Digital Editions and accessible on Androids and iPhones, desktop computers, and multiple tablets and e-reading platforms. Through the site, members composed of reviewers, media professionals, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, and educators can peruse NetGalley’s available titles, which are provided by over 100 publishers (and counting), including divisions/imprints from four of the Big Six houses. Members can select titles, and NetGalley serves as gatekeeper, passing along requests to publishers for approval (their website even clearly outlines approval guidelines for each publisher). Publishers can set expiration dates for when the galleys will no longer be available, and NetGalley also supports the aggregation of other digital promotional items like video, audio, or artwork under any title’s record page so that publishers can easily create digital media kits for readers to access along with the galley.

Read more at Publishing Trends