My friend Anna Lowe Weber’s poem “Tale” is a feature poem at Verse Daily.

I somehow stumbled on this yesterday, some book recommendations about economic history. Looks interesting.

Pepsi vs. Coke over at The Consumerist.

Coming soon. Review here:

Yet, if the caricature and hyperbole sometimes become tedious, the language, often in the same paragraph, can modulate to a spooky level of precision; Pynchon can skewer American popular culture better than anyone else around, as in this description of a Las Vegas gambling machine hitting the jackpot: “… several kinds of hell broke loose. To a military fanfare heavy on the bass horns, plus train whistles, fire sirens, and canned athletic-stadium cheering, a quantity of JFK half-dollars began to vomit out of the machine in a huge parabolic torrent …” Beneath all this mayhem and fun, however, Inherent Vice is a serious, even brooding, book, and the core of the novel is an anguished cry – they’re stealing the 1960s from right under our noses.

Question: Why is noir perhaps best-suited for the west coast? I watched “Bullitt” the other day and realized that all those police noir movies take place out there. Is it because of Raymond Chandler? Or Hollywood? Or some particular quality about the west coast itself?

Pitcher Mark Buehrle through a perfect game last night against Tampa, which is only the 16th time this has happened in the modern era. (A perfect game means he pitched all nine innings and no one from Tampa got on base.) From the article:

The pitcher received a congratulatory telephone call from President Barack Obama — a White Sox fan — following the 16th perfect game since the modern era began in 1900 and the first since Johnson’s on May 18, 2004.

Nguyen’s new novel is now available.

Ernest turns 110.