As word has spread about Olsson's closing its five stores yesterday, folks have flocked to the testimonials page the bookseller set up. A handful of writers have weighed in with their memories; a selection follows.
Like others above, I first entered the Georgetown store in the early 1980s and spent hours in the stacks finding [...]
I'm well aware that I'm hitchin' up the Andy Rooney pants in asking this, but: Is it just me, or has journalism renewed its love affair with the "drop dead" headline? There's a ton of 'em at the moment, mainly attached to the ongoing bailout negotiations:
Washington to Wall Street: Drop Dead
However, it also encompasses [...]
Bad news for D.C. bookstores today: DCist reports that Olsson's Dupont Circle store has closed. This follows the bookseller filing for bankruptcy in July; earlier this month Shelf Awareness reported that the local chain's head book buyer and general manager, Alexis Akre, left the company.
Nobody's picking up the phone at any of the chain's [...]
With the help of Greenpeace, D.C. artist Mark Jenkins recently scared the bejesus out of authorities by staging some bear sculptures around town. The foofaraw has since died down, but today he tells BoingBoing's David Pescovitz what he was up to. He doesn't say too much more than what was in Greenpeace's press release, but [...]
WUSA has an article on its Web site addressing e-mailed rumors that you can't wear campaign paraphernalia to the polls on election day. The rules actually differ depending on where you live in the DMV: Virginians can't wear anything with a candidate's name on it to the polls; voters in Maryland can, though poll workers [...]
As anybody with eyes and ears knows by now, Sarah Palin isn't so great at articulating what it means to be Russia's neighbor. But if having an veep candidate who knows Russia-Alaska relations is important—and after all, "as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where [...]
Hey! Check it out: Today is National Punctuation Day, a day that's scientifically proven to be the most-ignored non-holiday among the nation's blog commenters! What's the rationale for the holiday (which isn't really a holiday [I mean, there's no card for it, and nobody gets a day off])? Glad you asked; according to the official [...]
You probably know by now that the newspaper industry is in the crapper—and no amount of image-heavy redesigns, promoted with the help of faux-U2 soundtracks, is going to staunch the bleeding. The same problems are hitting the magazine industry as well. There are plenty of canaries in that particular coal mine; personally, I get a [...]
If there's one thing we can recognize around here, it's gallows humor, and Chico Harlan snuck in a nice dig at the 100-losses-here-we-come Nats in today's Post. In an item about the final game at Yankee Stadium, Harlan reported that one of the invitees to the celebration was Aaron Boone, the hero of the 2003 [...]
Silver Spring novelist and mathematician Manil Suri was at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend to promote his new novel, The Age of Shiva. You can dig in our archives to find our interview with Suri, but the more entertaining viewing is the video below, in which he performs a Bollywood dance onstage at the [...]
In it, we'll learn that John Wilkes Booth was concocted by a Baltimore Sun reporter angling for a Pulitzer.
In all seriousness, it does sound pretty awesome. I'm hoping this gets used for the promotional poster.
This isn't the most relevant detail to fuss over, I know, given the horrible fact of Wallace's passing. For me, and for at least one of my colleagues, Wallace was a supremely important writer—a guy who could not only access a fearsome arsenal of postmodern tools, but employ them sensibly, and make it look like [...]
September is get-back-to-work month, which means a lot of publishers are going to start guilting you about reading serious literature. Hunkering down at home with the voice of a generation is one option. But you can also cheat a little by getting out of the house and letting others read to you. This month marks [...]
I don't think I have the stomach to process a lot of the news stories commemorating the fact that it's been seven years since 9/11—too many of them will be too mawkish, too partisan, or just too much of a reminder of sad information I already know about. But somebody's come up with a tribute [...]
