Mike Scalise

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic, and during this time a bunch of people that I know have made some things happen. So mixed in with your standard links to everything under the sun, some long overdue news about my acquaintences accomplishments. Nice, right?

Congrats to person I know and DC-deserter Ryan Call, who was named the fiction editor of NOO, a journal that “encourages mainstream readers to reconnect with literature and diverse critical thinking.”

Jacket Copy tries to decipher the recent Candian literary feud (insert “what’s that all aboot?” joke here).

Ever wonder how Dave Eggers & Co. picked the selections for The Best American Nonrequired Reading Series? Well, here are the transcripts.

Person I know Sufiya Abdur-Rahman recently broadcast an excellent essay for NPR’s This I Believe series.

The Believer says goodbye to Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column.

Salon talks with DC-ish author Curtis Sittenfeld about her new DC-ish book, “American Wife.”

Other Latitudes author and person I know Brian Brodeur has a poem up on Verse Daily.

Check out this furniture made from used books (via BoingBoing).

Politics & Prose, meet Junot Diaz. Junot Diaz, meet rabid, stuffed bookstore.

Just because he loves blogs so much, figure I’d link to PaperCuts’ promoting a conversation about “Buzz” Bissinger’s 2000 book, Friday Night Lights.

The annual and tremendous Fall for the Book Festival is underway. Here’s the blog, the website, and the RSS feed of Google Calendar events. (I’m most looking forward to the So to Speak reading–where I stuttered and stammered out this nonsense last year–featuring people I know Alyson Foster, Sarah Klenakis, Danika Stegeman, Sally Keith and Kyoko Mori).

And finally, from person I know Scott Berg’s cover story in the WaPo Mag last week, “The Beginning of the Road“:

DAN BAILEY IS AS CASUAL AND AMIABLE A PERSON AS YOU’D EVER WANT TO MEET, but there’s something about the milieu over which he presides — a seriously funky room full of powerful computers and diligently working students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County — that seems to require me to use the word “mastermind.” This is UMBC’s Imaging Research Center, a high-technology hive of undergraduates and master’s candidates under Bailey’s tutelage who are producing amazing examples of digital animation at a ridiculous pace. The center’s commissions come from all over and have recently included a tour through the ancient cities of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, a visualization of architect Louis Kahn’s unbuilt Hurva Synagogue, a digital puppet of President Bush for real-time editorial cartooning, and a virtual stroll at eye level through the adjacent apartments of sisters Etta and Claribel Cone in Baltimore’s Marlborough building, where until 1950 one of the world’s most impressive private collections of Matisses, Picassos, Cezannes, van Goghs and Renoirs hung on the walls. Bailey’s students are also working on a digital representation of Sherman’s march and a complex multiplayer video game, based loosely on psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which relies on cognitive teamwork to rebuild a post-apocalyptic world.