There is, hope, after all, for literacy -- if you can believe this account of excited young readers at the National Book Festival, hosted recently by First Lady Laura Bush and held on the National Mall, in Washington. Plenty of authors of books for adults make appearances at the festival -- this year Paul Theroux, Salman Rushdie, and Rick Atkinson, for example -- but it's the writers of childrens' and young-adult books who seem to generate the most excitement, their tents crammed with adoring fans, the authors mobbed at signings:

You expect this sort of adoration for movie stars, so it is especially gratifying -- no, thrilling -- to see it directed at children's book authors. I introduced several kids' authors at the festival, and watched an awkward boy -- glasses, a little overweight, bag laden with books -- screw up his courage to ask each author to autograph the festival poster. Each time, he was clearly terrified, and each time he managed to pull it off. His mother was in the background just beaming with pride. …

And then came R.L. Stine, author of more than 300 books, all of them creepy. Stine, who looks like he's lived for far too long in a haunted house, got the kids in the audience to write a ghost story with him. For instance, he asked them whether the fearless hero, a boy named Joel, should start paddling when he saw a boatful of zombies coming toward him or jump in the water? Should he use his guitar pick to get a monster out of his canoe or consult a book he has just discovered at the bottom of the canoe called, conveniently, "How to Get a Monster Out of Your Canoe"? The kids yelled check the book; Stine claimed the book told the boy to use the guitar pick … [author's ellipsis]

Stine had asked me to tell the audience that he couldn't sign autographs after his talk because he had to catch a plane. I told them, twice, but Stine's young fans swarmed him anyway.

The editor of the Washington Post Book World, meanwhile, notes that politics made an appearance at the festival:

Back in the VIP tent, where authors could retreat for food and coffee, Francine Prose confessed that even with all the magic, she hadn't been able to hold her tongue. At the White House breakfast early that morning, under the dark ring of clouds that had threatened the city, she had put it to Laura Bush directly: "Mrs. Bush, I'm deeply impressed by all you do for American children. I only wish you cared as much for the children of Iraq."

Disclosure: I'm married to the author of the first item I quote here.

It's quite unusual for a nonprofit museum to get involved in partisan politics -- there's no way to avoid offending at least some prospective donors -- but the Adler Planetarium, in Chicago, which describes itself as the oldest in the Western hemisphere, felt the need to clear its name following Tuesday's presidential debate.

Senator McCain, you may recall, ridiculed Senator Obama for helping to secure $3 million in earmark money for an "overhead projector" for the planetarium.

The planetarium makes several points in a statement it released Wednesday [NB: it's a pdf, but only one page]:

1. The device Senator McCain referred to is the massive apparatus that projects stars onto the planetarium's screen. (The museum's present model is a 40-year-old "Zeiss Mark VI projector.") It bears little resemblance, in other words, to that device your eighth-grade teacher used to project equations onto a screen.

2. The planetarium has sought the help of numerous politicians in finding money to replace or upgrade its projector, because it believes scientific literacy is an issue of national importance and the present one is obsolete. But so far it has found no takers: There was no $3 million earmark, in other words.

3. The planetarium has, however, received lesser amounts of earmark money to support other projects, courtesy of Illinois politicians. But Senator Obama played no role in securing these, the museum says. "This is clearly evidenced," the statement concludes, "by recent transparency laws implemented by the Congress, which have resulted in the names of all requesting Members being listed next to every earmark in the reports that accompany appropriations bills."

Very interesting that a cultural institution would respond to a political attack -- not aimed at it per se -- in this fashion.

Via Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.

Jim Lehrer, of the PBS News Hour, was particularly relentless on this point when he moderated the first presidential debate, but Tom Brokaw picked up the baton in the second one: Both TV journalists wanted to know -- Lehrer did everything but get up and grab the candidates by the lapels -- what spending proposals they'd discard now that a financial meltdown is upon us. And Time's Mike Scherer has joined their chorus, notes Matt Yglesias.

There's something odd about their ardor, Yglesias points out, since the conventional wisdom among economists-- left or right -- is that cutting government spending is precisely the wrong thing to do during a recession. It is, after all, what Herbert Hoover did, and we all know how that worked out. (Contemporary conservatives, taking their cues from Milton Friedman, prefer to tackle recessions by lowering interest rates, taking a monetary-supply approach to the problem, but there's little room left for the Fed to cut rates, making that a not-so-viable option.)

Neither candidate, to his credit, Yglesias says, has acceded to the cries from some quarters for massive spending cuts. However, he concludes, "a lot of the press's leading lights seem to think we ought to follow Herbert Hoover off the cliff."

I noted last week that a Time was up for the "best concept cover" award, a subcategory in the 2008 "best cover" competition sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors. For a special issue on the environment, Time's designers manipulated a photograph of the iconic flag-raising, by Marines, during the Battle of Iwo Jima -- replacing the flag with a stout tree. The editor of Connecticut magazine noted that his designers had come up with pretty much the same idea years ago (though their version featured ordinary people raising a sapling).

The judges, however, passed Time over this week in the best-concept category in favor of "Eustace Tillarobama," the New Yorker's cover for February 11 & 18, 2008:

The cover that won the top prize -- best cover, period -- was the product of the minds at New York magazine, who went with a full-length photographic portrait of Eliot Spitzer, with annotation suggesting not what he was thinking he was thinking as he made use of the services of high-priced prostitutes, but with what:

Certain cliched images and phrases decorate press coverage during every economic crisis: those jagged, downward-trending charts tracking the Dow, for instance, ad nauseum repetition of the phrase "jittery investors" -- and endless photographs of harried men (they're almost always men) standing or otherwise deployed on trading floors in states of angst or despair.

Sad Guys on Trading Floors is an insta-blog trying to capitalize -- or create a sort of art out of -- the latter trend. The brainchild of Jessica Hemerly, a research manager for media technology at the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto, and Chris Riebschlager, a designer for a Kansas City, Missouri, advertising firm, it's your one-stop site for pictures of people on the front lines of the financial meltdown.

These are among the 34 images posted so far on Sad Guys today, October 8, alone. The site's motto: "Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever Internet memes."

Via BoingBoing, with thanks to Josh Glenn.

An interesting survey of opinions, courtesy of Intellectual Affairs, on whether American literature is, as a Swedish worthy recently pronounced, too "insular" to produce a Nobel-worthy writer.

I linked earlier this week to a piece in Slate that concluded that we shouldn't take the Nobel seriously till Philip Roth wins. I tend, rather, to side with one of the commenters weighing in on the Intellectual Affairs quasi-symposium.

It's pretty silly that Updike hasn't received the Nobel yet. His short stories alone would merit it. Add his best 6 or 8 novels, and it's a compelling case. Also, if you read his criticism, it is apparent that he reads widely, without regard to national boundaries. He may write frequently about New England white people (horrors!), but his influences strike me as anything but provincial.

Future readers may consider Updike our era's Mozart; Mozart was once written off as a too-prolific composer of "charming nothings," and some speak of Updike that way.* A pity.

That last point, especially, seems prescient.

The winner of this year's prize will be announced tomorrow.

*See: James Wood.

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor in Harvard's English department and a Shakespeare expert, visited The Colbert Report last week to discuss parallels between Shakespeare's plays and the presidential (and vice-presidential) candidates. "McCain sounds a lot like Macbeth," observed Colbert, who performed a bit of Shakespeare himself while an undergraduate at Northwestern, "a passionate man prized for his military heroism. Now, sure, Macbeth murdered his friend the king. But back then that just made Macbeth a McMaverick."

Obama, meanwhile, is "an egghead elitist who can't make up his mind. Clearly, Obama is Hamlet. It makes sense. He is haunted by his father, not to mention his father figure. Plus, let us not forget he drove a good woman insane."

Sarah Palin takes the hardest blow -- and it's Greenblatt, author of "Will in the World," an acclaimed biography, who delivers it.

Via The Chicago Blog.

Asked why time-pressed readers should bookmark The Daily Beast, her new buzz-chasing online publication, when they already read "Slate/Drudge/Huffington Post/TPM/Google News and every other magazine and newspaper," Tina Brown responds, in a Q & A on the site: "Sensibility, darling."

Interestingly, one aspect of the Beast's design, its logo, shares many features with that of the Daily News, Philadelphia's tabloid.

The parallel is pointed out by Will Bunch, of the News's Attytood blog, who asks, "Why is Tina Brown, um, 'borrowing' from the Daily News?" The News and Tina Brown: partners in sensibility? (We can only imagine the regal Brown's reaction if someone proposed the name "Attytood" for a Beast blog.)

Mohja Kahf, author of the novel "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf," fights back against the charge that Islam, or the Islamic world in general, treats women badly. Among many, many other points she makes is this one:

Medieval Christianity excoriated Islam for being orgiastic, which seems to mean that Muslims didn't lay a guilt trip on hot sex (at least within what were deemed licit relationships). Now that hot sex is all the rage in the post-sexual revolution West, you'd think Muslims would get some credit for the pro-sex attitude of Islam -- but no. The older stereotype has been turned on its head, and in the new one, we're the prudes. Listen, we're the only monotheistic faith I know with an actual legal rule that the wife has a right to orgasm.

She concedes there are still some challenges: Misogyny persists in some places, and some minds, in a form that is "almost as bad as American misogyny."

(I would, however, like to hear more about why she refers to "this nonsensical Western custom of teenage dating" and prefers having professional men make overtures to the families of young women, virtually out of the blue.)

UPDATE: A reader writes in to argue that Kahf is wrong on the orgasm point: The Talmud, she recalls, contains a similar injunction "that a man is obligated to give his wife pleasure before he takes it himself." She can't provide a citation, though. Can any other Brainiac reader? Reply in the comments or send an email to brainiac.email@gmail.com

Best line I've read yet about the charge leveled by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, that American writers are too parochial to merit the prize:

When Engdahl declares, "You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world," there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it's the pictures that got smaller.

Via Slate.

Tina Brown's new project -- I almost typed "Tina Fey's," which hints at how one Tina has eclipsed the other in the cultural firmament in the last few years, especially the last few weeks -- launched today, if you hadn't noticed. It's called The Daily Beast.

The site's pointers to other articles and sources of information are sharply written, and the whole thing is crisply designed. But does the world need another site aggregating and riffing on cultural and political content found on the Web? (I probably shouldn't ask that.)

For the record, Brown, in a Q & A on the site, quibbles with the idea that the Beast is an aggregator. "The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates." Gotcha. And, to be fair, there are some well-known writers who have been recruited to feed the Beast: Christopher Buckley, Tucker Carlson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be blogging, for example.

If you only know a little bit about Pompei, the Roman city that was consumed by Vesuvius's eruption in the year 79 (and thereby preserved for later study), these might be among the things you remember: The eruption caught its citizens almost entirely by surprise, almost everyone was killed -- turned into grim friezes of ordinary Roman life -- and the site remained undisturbed until its rediscovery many centuries later (in the 1700s, as it happens).

In a bit of erudite book-promotion, Mary Beard, a Cambridge classicist whose "Pompei: The Life of a Roman Town" has just been published, debunks these and other myths about the city on her TLS-affiliated blog: In fact, she writes, most people escaped unharmed: "Just over 1,000 bodies have been discovered -- out of a population of perhaps 12,000." And the archaeological site is hardly pristine. "Almost straightway the locals came back to salvage their stuff, digging through the volcanic rubble, and if they were lucky, heaving out some of the most valuable stuff," Beard writes. Some of these people died when their tunnels collapsed, providing future fodder for archaeologists.

There had also been "rumblings and mini-earthquakes for days" preceding the eruption, which led some citizens to flee and others, foolishly, to call in the interior decorators to fix cracks in their walls.

Beard also casts a skeptical eye on one salacious bit of Pompei lore. The body of a wealthy woman (as indicated by her jewelry) was found in the gladiators' barracks. Was she visiting her chiseled downmarket lover, her very own Russell Crowe, as tour books sometimes suggest? Alas, no, Beard writes: She was almost certainly just seeking shelter as she fled town and things suddenly took a turn for the worse.

For more debunking of factoids you probably didn't know in the first place, see her entry "Ten things you need to know about Pompei."

Eric Baker, a principal of Eric Baker Design Associates, in Manhattan, has a minor obsession: Each morning, before work, he spends a half hour or so online seeking out images that are "beautiful, funny, absurd and yet inspiring." He started out by collecting the images and then mailing them to a single friend, in Los Angeles. Gradually, he added more people to his e-list, sending out the images under the title "Today." Today -- that is, today, Friday, Oct 3 -- he lets the readers of Design Observer in on what he found this a.m.

The images come with no explanation, although he writes: "At times, sometimes by accident or occasionally by design, a relationship in the images will emerge. Mostly, though, I love the vagaries of the images -- their beauty, absurdity and naivete." This is the tiniest sampling; you have to go to the site for the full effect.

Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architectural firm responsible for the much-praised "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium in Beijing, has unveiled plans for a skyscraper in Paris that, the firm claims, will cast no shadow on the more traditional buildings surrounding it.

From one angle, the glass-sheathed building appears to be a massive pyramid, dominating the skyline; from another, it presents as a thin, tall shard. Unless Herzog & de Meuron have repealed the laws of physics, the idea must be that it is this thinness that creates the unobtrusiveness, minimizing shadow in two directions. (An alternative suggestion, put forward by Gizmodo, is that the structure will be "made of cloned cells from the Invisible Girl.")

The architects say their shape allows for "optimum solar and wind power generation," though they skimp on the details. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2014, in the Porte de Versailles area of the city. From the action in forums on sites where the design has been presented, Parisians are divided as to whether this will be a brilliant addition to the cityscape -- or whether they'd rather see it not casting its shadow in Dubai, where it might fit in better.

A strikingly different view from another angle is after the jump.

Thy tongue, Joe Biden! Learn to curb its call,
Lest universal verbiage bury all.

That heroic couplet comes courtesy of the author Jim Holt -- and, more indirectly, Jennifer Schuessler, former editor of Ideas, now at the Times. She asked some frequent Book Review contributors to versify about the two contenders in tonight's main event.

Consider Holt's effort an amuse bouche: On the blog Paper Cuts, you'll also find brief poems by Henry Alford and Christopher Buckley -- and Jennifer checks in, too, with the Globe's Alex Beam on the subject of Palin and palindromes.

According to the L.A. Times, VP candidate Sarah Palin has made the case in numerous conversations that dinosaurs and humans shared the earth.

Harvard University Press asked Ronald Numbers, author of "The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design," to explain the origins of that particular view -- dino-human co-existence -- within the larger ambit of creationism. His whole commentary is here, but here's one interesting tidbit from Numbers's guest post on the HUP blog:

The young-earth creationism (a.k.a. scientific creationism) she seems to favor grew out of religious group known as the Seventh-day Adventists, founded in the nineteenth century by a young prophetess named Ellen G. White. Inspired by her visions and interpretation of Genesis, one of her disciples, a Canadian named George McCready Price, cobbled together a distinctive creationist model of earth history that attributed the formation of virtually all fossil-bearing rocks to the year of Noah's flood. During the 1940s, Price and a small group of devotees in the Deluge Geology Society announced the discovery of gigantic fossil footprints of humans (supposedly those of the antediluvian giants mentioned in the Bible) alongside, and occasionally overlapping, those of dinosaurs, who, according to the best scientific authorities, had died out about 65 million years before the appearance of humans. For decades these footprints, found in the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, served creationists as proof that evolutionists were wrong. However, careful research by creationists, first published in the 1970s, eventually convinced all but the most obstinate believers that the stories of giant human tracks were a myth; indeed, some had been carved by local craftsmen to sell as souvenirs.

Bonus Harvard University Press blog content: An example of taste overlap between HUP's book designers and "Springfield, Massachusetts' own favorite nu-metallers, Staind."

A Turing test is the standard for determining whether a computer is effectively mimicking human speech. You type questions on a screen, someone or something responds, and you have to decide whether the answers you're getting come from man or machine. If you guess man and it's a machine, the computer passes the test.

Jack Balkin, of Balkinization, asks: Can you tell if the answers you get here are coming from Sarah Palin or from software that paid close attention to Katie Couric's Palin interviews? (One of the joys of Web-based advertising: The McCain campaign is actually paying for ads on this site.)

And, from the right side of the aisle: Amanda Carpenter -- a conservative, video-oriented pundit-in-training -- makes a not-unreasonable case that Gwen Ifill ought not to have been chosen as the moderator for tonight's debate. The objection does not hinge on race, per se, as you may be fearing -- as I feared as the tape began to roll -- but rather on a book Ifill has written, whose publication coincides with election day. If Obama wins, goes the logic, Ifill stands to make more money than if McCain wins. (Race does, of course, hover in the background of the argument, but the conflict of interest charge can stand on its own.)

The British TV host and literary critic Clive James is undergoing a late efflorescence as a poet, one brought on, perhaps, by fresh appreciation of his talents. A previous generation of critics, he writes in an introduction to his new book, "Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008," "often found me guilty of sounding as if I were having too much fun." But when his "Collected Poems" appeared in 2003, "now here were this new bunch suggesting that I just might be -- with due allowance for the poisonously long half-life of television celebrity -- some kind of poet after all."

Laurels may have bred productivity. His new book is essentially two books, he notes: The first comprises works written during his first 45 years as a working poet; the second features the products of the last five years.

James's most famous poem, "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered," which begins "The book of my enemy has been remaindered / and I am pleased," remains perhaps the last word in literary schadenfreude." (It's a cousin of Gore Vidal's remark that every time a friend succeeds, a little piece of him dies.) Appropriately, it leads off this collection.

There are many moments of joy and amusement in the second half of the book -- indeed, in all of it -- but one poem, "Windows Is Shutting Down," leapt out at me for the way it reframes a sentence to which I'd, oddly, never given a second thought, though millions of people read it every day. It ties the famous Microsoft sign-off to the general deterioration of literary standards. (Or might it be commentary on the pointlessness and pedantry of such complaints?) It begins:

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,*
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

And the final line:

Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

*However, such a letter might get you a mention in Jan Freeman's column.

"Last fall, more than 2,700 heavily armed Yale students faculty, and alumni assembled on the Massachusetts border. Several days later, they overcame the pitifully meager Cantabridgian forces of Harvard … " So begins the tale, told in the September-October issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, of last year's edition of the GoCrossCampus Ivy League Championship Tournament. The competition is like an Internet-based version of the old board game Risk, with teams made up of hundreds or thousands of students and alumni from each campus, each team led by an appointed "commander," each vying to take over the Northeast (and squash the other members of the Ancient Eight).

The creators of GXC are four Yale undergradutes and a Columbia student, a creative team that got its start building a similar game that pitted Yale's undergraduate colleges against one another, a game that became a major local hit. They've since attracted about $1-million in venture capital, hired a 38-year-old executive vice president, and are at work on other team-based games designed to bolster camraderie within corporations.

Last year's tournament unfolded from October 22 to December 31; this year's started on September 16. Teams make moves daily. Whether you win territory depends largely on how many players you recruit to assault it alongside you, but the tournament, despite its seeming epic length, is not all-consuming: Everyone gets one move a day; you can plot it as long as you like, but the act itself doesn't take much time.

The competition, notes the author, James Kirchik, a Yale graduate now at the New Republic, has inspired some creative hack … -- er, cheating. Some players last year wrote computer programs that made it appear that their colleges had more warriors than they did, but GXC has taken steps to eliminate that problem, its says.

Harvard last year fell like the French army in 1940 (as you can see if you click on the above graphic and monitor the fate of crimson). Princeton -- confusingly depicted by the magazine as yellow, though the caption refers to Princeton's school colors ("Orange overcomes")-- was relentless. Kirchik concludes, in cadences that would make David McCullough proud: "In an all-or-nothing attempt to mount a defense, the Elis massed their remaining troops on the shores of Massachusetts. Two days later, after a final stand on the frigid beaches of Cape Cod, the Blue armies fell to the invaders."

Regardless of the mixed reviews, the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama was of Lincoln-Douglas caliber compared to what's going on on many college campuses. The Chronicle of Higher Education this week has an extraordinary story on how the debate world has descended into fights between coaches and judges -- including a mooning, captured for posterity on YouTube -- and instances in which debaters ignore the topics at hand to rail against the inherent racism of debate competitions. Often, these are winning tactics.

This excellent, brief (1:40) narrated video, which includes a SFW mooning and a few NSFW curses, offers a window into the bizarre world of debate today -- a world apart from that which existed in the days of William F. Buckley. (It even makes the Buckley-Vidal TV slurfests look, by comparison, civil.)

Disclosure/self-promotion: I have a piece in the Chronicle Review, the books & opinion section of the paper, on the insurgent subfield of philosophy known as "X-Phi," or experimental philosophy.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the full article on the bizarre state of college debate.