For now, the book tends to carry more weight than individual tweets, photos, or articles in newspapers and magazines. But that may be a historical anomaly – the fact that printed books have traditionally been of a certain length and have taken time to assemble and publish. As ebook publishing speeds up, the line between books and extended magazine articles will blur. “There are people who insist that a book is a narrative form that is transhistorical,” says Colin Robinson, co-founder of OR Books. “I suspect books have been defined as what a binding machine is able physically to hold together. If you remove the constraint, you are left with a continuum between a tweet and a tome.”

Read the full article in The Financial Times

With his much-touted list of prominent scientists who dispute global warming, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) is a leading voice in climate skepticism. Yet some diligent sleuths, as well as other scientists, have uncovered awkward facts about his list (now in its fourth year and third iteration). First, Inhofe has received at least a million dollars in campaign contributions from big oil and gas; and to take the original list as an example, 84 of his 400 skeptics likewise have industry ties. Equally awkward are these people’s questionable credentials: 44 are TV weathercasters, 20 economists and 70 simply experts in nothing germane to climatology. Worst of all, increasing numbers of Inhofe’s skeptics have turned out to be climate change believers, and despite repeatedly trying to dissociate themselves from the list and asking to be removed from it, remain on it anyway.

Just as the scientific consensus on climate change is well-established, so too the reasons for the denial are clear. Our civilization runs on the fuels causing climate change, so there are many vested interests that will do their utmost to suppress information about these fuels’ harmful effects. Deniers may relish the chance to attack the scruples of climate scientists in the wake of ClimateGate (never mind that these scientists were subsequently cleared of any unscrupulousness), but the example of Senator Inhofe and many others show that the deniers have committed their own share of fraud. They also constitute an infinitesimal minority of the scientific community—numbering about a half-dozen—that has been granted grossly disproportionate airtime, receive their funding from oil companies and keep repeating the same old arguments in broken-record style.

Read the full review in Energy Bulletin

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology’s slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That’s 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.

We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit — at least in this case — is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.

Read more on CNN

Egypt’s 2011 protests have been fueled by the music of its slogans and chants, which have become a group exercise in the construction and reconstruction of meaning. Beyond Tahrir, a global audience has wanted to listen in, and two recent books have opened it up to English-language audiences: Tweets from Tahrir and Messages from Tahrir. The former is the first book in English to give voice to what happened in downtown Cairo’s main square, and early in the process its editors decided to forgo translation and use only tweets originally written in English. Editor Alex Nunns said that many of the Arabic tweets contained too much information for 140 English characters, and that “it would have looked false if some tweets had been really long.” Messages from Tahrir, on the other hand, is a photograph-heavy book that displays many of the signs and slogans of the square. Its editor, Karima Khalil, had no choice but to translate the sometimes-rhyming, often-humorous snippets of Arabic. In so doing, she confronted many of the difficulties of a translator of poetry. Poetry has its own linguistic concerns—surprise, echo, sound—but both verse and slogans often require that the translator work in tight, idiomatic spaces where there is little room to balance one part of the text with another, to lose and make up ground.

Read the full article in The Believer

Ever wish you could visit the locations in your favorite novels?

In our new Book Maps feature, we will interview an author or biographer about locations in their book. We will also create a special Google Map about the interview so you can take a walking or driving tour through the book in real life. Email GalleyCat if you have other Book Map suggestions.

For our first installment, we asked Joe Woodward to share the places where novelist Nathanael West lived and worked in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Woodward took us on a book tour of Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West. The Google Map is embedded above–click on the blue pins for more details about a specific location.

Read the rest on GalleyCat