Fugard to The Koran

On authors in my recommended reading.

Few of us are blessed with a memoirist like Fugard, whose lyrical "Exits and Entrances" is a tender homage to both [South African stage actor Andre] Huguenet and theater itself. --Mike Fischer

Buying John Updike’s typewriter or Harlan Ellison’s tooth-scarred and twisted-in-rage screenplays is rather pedestrian, as literati curios go. Why not stop being such a phony and get a real conversation starter like J.D. Salinger’s “personally owned” toilet, which is currently being auctioned on eBay for the Buy It Now price of $1 million? --Sean O'Neal

Symbiogenesis theory flies in the face of an accepted scientific dogma called neo-Darwinism, which holds that adaptations occur exclusively through random mutation, and that as genes mutate in unpredictable ways, their gradual accumulation sometimes results in useful attributes that give the organisms an advantage that eventually translates into evolutionary change.
     What tipped Margulis off that new traits could arise in another way was the fact that DNA, thought to reside only in the nucleus, was found in other bodies of the same cell. This realization led to research showing not only how crucial symbiotic relationships can be to the immediate survival of organisms, but also that one of the most significant sources of innovation — indeed, even the origins of new species — occurs when, over time, symbiotic partners fuse to create new organisms. --Eric Goldscheider

The Carriage  --XKCD

(via Althouse)

He [Mark Twain] had one eye trained on his stock in trade, the Wild West, and the other searching the horizons 3,000 miles to the East, where all the great glorification factories were.
     “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published not in The Alta California, but in a New York weekly, The Saturday Press, on Nov. 18, 1865, then reprinted all over the country. --Tom Wolfe

Piqued at the Jews for rejecting a creed that—with its dietary laws, ritual circumcision and daily prayers towards (at first) Jerusalem—was so closely modelled on their own, the Prophet Muhammad decreed that they, along with Christians, would henceforth be considered dhimmiyeen under Islam; “protected” as fellow monotheists, but subject to a heavy tax and various other indignities. --The Economist