On November 30^th 2011, the Google doodle team created a Mark Twain Google Doodle to celebrate what would have been the 174^th birthday of one of America’s greatest novelists.

Read more here.

A New York Times article matches the speech patterns of 13(!) American presidential candidates with the books they sound like. There's a fascinating graphic that puts candidates and books on a sort of coordinate plane grid based on where their language use falls from simple to complex (y axis) and negative to positive (x axis).

Most negative? Rand Paul, who's surrounded by the Aeneid and Oliver Twist.

Most simple? Donald Trump (surprised?), who's next to The Legends of King Arthur and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Hillary's on the positive and complex side of the plane, and most closely matches Austen's Persuasion (which isn't on the grid but is mentioned at the bottom of the article). Ted Cruz is matched with Beowulf. 

Link

I'm deeply uncomfortable about disaster porn that focuses on Detroit because I'm not so sure about outsiders getting their apoca-rocks off on a place I feel some kinship towards. Especially because so often the documentation of Detroit's decaying landscape is coupled with judgement about whatever perceived sin: they're getting what they deserve. As a child of the Rust Belt and the Midwest, I roundly submit my middle finger to that. But I also can't deny the power of these images of the abandoned Mark Twain branch of the Detroit Public Library. Jesus, what a crying shame. 

When I'd read some of the John Green speech in other places, I'd thought the same thing: Why is he so dependent? How come we have to be co-dependent with him? He doesn't think it's possible to be on his own. :-/ And this is a bit of a slap to our noteworthy self-publishers of the past--Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain. We would not have their books if they hadn't TRIED.