Celebrated authors bypass publishing houses to sell ebooks via Amazon

Discontent over digital royalties prompts Roth, Amis and other leading names to enter into exclusive deal with Odyssey Editions

E-books attracting more Turkish readers

“The politics of fiction”: Thru a Turkish woman writer’s eye

Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.

About Elif Shafak
Shafak explicitly defies definition — her writing blends East and West, feminism and tradition, the local and the global, Sufism and rationalism, creating one of today’s most unique voices in literature.

Blind to Bhopal

December is the anniversary of the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal ? the world?s most harrowing industrial disaster to date. This will mark 26 years of turning a blind eye to the plight of thousands of victims.

Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure Updates (Word)

Source: U.S. Department of Defense Standards of Conduct Office

The updated encyclopedia now offers 155 pages of actual violations by Government personnel. The encyclopedia is organized by type of violations, including conflicts of interest, misuse of Government equipment, violations of post-employment restrictions, and travel. It is a valuable resource document for training and briefing personnel. For those already familiar with the encyclopedia, we have also posted an ?updates only? version that includes the most recent cases.

Google and the Digital Humanities

Looking to demonstrate the value of its controversial book-scanning project, Google gives out cash and database access to researchers. more

Whither the Wikis?

For all the buzz about wikis in higher education, the collaborative tools have gained only modest traction in academe. Why? more

A brief note on teleology

Vincent Pecora?co-director, with Jonathan Sheehan, of ?After Secularization: New Approaches to Religion and Modernity,? one of five research fields of the 2010 SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship?responds here to previous posts by Sheehan and the graduate fellows who will be blogging regularly at The Immanent Frame throughout the summer. Follow their ongoing efforts here.?ed.

Secularism ? a really interesting problematic: a conversation with Joan Wallach Scott

At a March 2010 conference, ?Gendering the Divide: Conflicts at the Border of Religion and the Secular? (sponsored by Arizona State University?s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict), I had the great fortune to speak on a panel with groundbreaking cultural historian and gender theorist Joan Wallach Scott, the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. The conference was the fourth and final meeting of ASU?s Ford Foundation-funded project on ?Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy.? In 2010-2011, Scott will lead the year-long seminar ?Secularism? at the Institute for Advanced Study?s School of Social Science.

On Beyond Tenure

The above chart comes from a recent widely circulated article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled ?Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education.? Similarly, the New York Times asked ?What if College Tenure Dies?? on its Room for Debate blog. In response, Amardeep Singh asks whether the actual numbers are declining, or simply the proportion of tenured faculty ? as a result of the rise of community colleges and for-profit institutions? Amardeep sees this as a reason for dismissing the whole thing as a ?non-issue? for ?most universities.? I?m not sure if he?s right ? even if tenured positions are growing, one would presumably also have to show that the rate of growth isn?t being affected by the increased use of part-timers ? but even if he is, I think the real question is the one Alexandre Enkerli asks on his blog: how do we think about the role of part-time teaching?

Our commitment to the digital humanities

It can?t have been very long after people started writing that they started to organize and comment on what was written. Look at the 10th century Venetus A manuscript, which contains scholia written fifteen centuries earlier about texts written five centuries before that. Almost since computers were invented, people have envisioned using them to expose the interconnections of the world?s knowledge. That vision is finally becoming real with the flowering of the web, but in a notably limited way: very little of the world?s culture predating the web is accessible online. Much of that information is available only in printed books.