Alexandra Sifferlin in Time:

2 slices of pumpkin pie (632 calories)

• 1 hour of running at 5 m.p.h.
• 2 hours of skiing
• 1 hour and 26 minutes of rowing
• 2 hours of walking at 3.5 m.p.h.
• 1 hour of football
• 1 hour and 43 minutes of resistance weight training

3 scoops of gravy (150 calories)

• 15 minutes of running
• 29 minutes of skiing
• 20 minutes of rowing
• 29 minutes of walking at 3.5 m.p.h.
• 16 minutes of football
• 25 minutes of resistance weight training

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The leaker says the source was a mysterious eBay auction, and Salinger scholar Kenneth Slawenski has confirmed for BuzzFeed that they are truly Salinger’s unpublished stories.Three unpublished stories by J.D. Salinger — “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” “Paula,” and “Birthday Boy” — have been available to read at research libraries, but have never been seen in print or online before today.

Summer Anne Burton in BuzzFeed:

It’s hard to determine the origin of the “book” pictured in the photos that were leaked onto invite-only bittorrent website what.CD today (and later reposted on Reddit) — the ISBN doesn’t lead anywhere, and a book of these three stories was certainly never printed legally.

The first story is “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” widely thought of as Salinger’s greatest unpublished work and is a prequel of sorts to the author’s most popular book, Catcher In The Rye.

The short story has been available to read at the Princeton library, under supervision, in a special reading room. PJ Vogt, a producer at On The Media, read the Princeton manuscript a few years ago and is fairly certain this is the same story. In an email tonight, he wrote “I definitely remember that first line: ‘His shoes turned up.’ And I remember the detail about the India ink on the catcher’s mitt. And that Holden has a cameo from camp.” The story concerns the death of Kenneth Caulfield, a character who was developed into Holden’s brother Allie in Catcher. The story was written for Harper’s Bazaar, but Salinger withdrew it before it was published.

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Lauren Collins in The New Yorker:

“Chili pepper” is a confusing term, another of Christopher Columbus’s deathless misnomers. (Columbus and his men classified the spicy plant they had heard being referred to in Hispaniola as aji—farther north, in Mexico, it was known by the Nahuatl word chilli—as a relative of black pepper.) Chilis belong to Capsicum, a genus of the nightshade family. Horticulturists consider them fruits, and grocers stock them near the limes and cilantro. Most chilis contain capsaicin, an alkaloid compound that binds to pain receptors on the tongue, producing a sensation of burning. Sweet banana peppers are usually neutral. Pepperoncini (approximately 300 SHU) produce just a flicker of heat, while cayennes (40,000) are to Scotch bonnets (200,000) as matches are to blowtorches. Capsaicin is meant to deter predators, but for humans it can be too little of a bad thing. Because capsaicin causes the body to release endorphins, acting as a sort of neural fire hose, many people experience chilis as the ideal fulcrum of pain and pleasure.

In recent years, “superhots”—chilis that score above 500,000 on the Scoville scale—have consumed the attention of chiliheads, who debate grow lights on Facebook (“You can overwinter with a few well-placed T-8s”), swap seeds in flat-rate boxes (Australian customs is their nemesis), and show up in droves at fiery-foods events (wares range from Kiss My Bhut hot sauce to Vanilla Heat coffee creamer). Chilis, in general, are beautiful. There is a reason no one makes Christmas lights in the shape of rutabagas. Superhots come in the brightest colors and the craziest shapes.

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Frederic Raphael at the Times Literary Supplement:

We begin, as film treatments so often say, in a screening room in Berlin in 1933.

“At the front of the room was Dr. Ernst Seeger, the chief censor from long before Hitler came to power. Next to Seeger were his assistants: a conductor, a philosopher, an architect and a pastor. Further back were the representatives of a film distribution company and two expert witnesses. The movie they were about to watch came all the way from America, and it was called King Kong.”

After the projection of the film, Dr Seeger asked Professor Zeiss, from the German Health Office, “In your expert opinion could this picture be expected to damage the health of normal spectators?”. Zeiss inquired whether the company trying to sell the film was German or American. When told that it was German, “Zeiss erupted. ‘I am astounded and shocked,’ he yelled, ‘that a German company would dare to seek permission for a film that can only be damaging to the health of its viewers . . . this film is NOTHING LESS THAN AN ATTACK ON THE NERVES OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE! . . . It provokes our racial instincts to show a blonde woman of the Germanic type in the hands of an ape. Itharms the healthy racial feelings of the German people’”.

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In the New York Review of Books:

Already as a young, ascendant boxer in his mid-teens Mike Tyson was drawing attention for the rapid-fire, nonstop aggression of his ring style even in amateur boxing matches in which points are scored by hits, as in fencing, without respect to the power of punches. He’d been trained—at first during weekend passes from his upstate reform school—to fight like a professional by Cus D’Amato, a revered if controversial and contentious trainer whose previous world champions were Floyd Patterson and José Torres. “The whole amateur boxing establishment hated me…. And if they didn’t like me, they despised Cus.” Typically, Tyson terrified his opponents by his very size and manner. At the Olympic trials in 1983 the Tyson legend was beginning:

On the first day, I achieved a forty-two-second KO. On the second day, I punched out the front two teeth of my opponent and left him out cold for ten minutes. Then on the third day, the reigning tournament champ withdrew from the fight.

To see Tyson’s early fights, both amateur and professional, is to see young boxers stalked, cornered, and swiftly beaten into submission by a younger boxer who pursues them across the ring with the savagery and determination of Dempsey, whose nonstop, combative, and punitive ring style Tyson imitated under D’Amato’s guidance. To see these fights in quick succession, the shared incredulity of the boxers who have found themselves in the ring with the relatively short, short-armed Tyson, their disbelief and astonishment at the sheer force of their opponent as he swarms upon them, is to witness a kind of Theater of the Absurd, which is perhaps the most helpful way to understanding boxing.

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Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Poor Fernand Léger. He is a man trapped in sociology. His paintings aren’t looked at for their own sake anymore but for what they show us about city life in the early 20th century.

You can see why Léger’s art is approached sociologically when you look at his most famous painting “The City,” painted in 1919. “The City” is owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum, “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” features “The City” as its central work. It is because of this painting that Léger is often called “the painter of the modern city.”

In “The City” we see, well, the city. We see the jumble of shapes and colors, the snatches of advertisements, the confusion of content that had already become, by the early decades of the 20th century, characteristic of the urban environment. In paintings like “The City,” and in any number of canvases Léger painted in following years, we find a painter coming to terms visually with the new and startling aspects of that urban environment. It makes sense that Léger was startled. He’d been sent off to fight WWI in 1914, like so many other young Frenchmen. The sights and sounds of the Great War pulverized his sensibilities. When he got back to Paris a few years later, his sensibilities were pulverized some more. The city was being lit up and mechanized with all sorts of new fangled devices, just like the battlefields.

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Miriam Markowitz in The Nation:

A few years ago, the literary world was beset by a bogeywoman who came bearing bad news and the numbers to prove it; her name was VIDA. Some assumed this moniker was an acronym or a misspelled allusion to Virginia Woolf’s famous literary paramour, Vita Sackville-West, but it wasn’t. VIDA was an all-caps neologism that would come to haunt the dreams of editors of magazines large and small, eminent and less so, with your author, dear reader, included among those unsound sleepers.

“Veedah. Veeedaahh….”

If you are an accredited member of the magazine world or else a vigilant fellow traveler, chances are that you already know about VIDA. You have heard of the Count, which tallies bylines by gender at publications that “are widely recognized as prominent critical and/or commercial literary venues.” You have opinions about what the numbers mean and how magazines should or will respond to them. If you are a partisan of the Count, or a feminist, or a woman writer, there is a good chance that, having read the opening paragraph of this essay, you are puzzled or angry. If you are a reactionary, an embattled editor or a plain old contrarian, you may already be cheering: Look, here we go, a woman writer and editor socking it to those sourpuss byline-counters! It is easy to incite, in the small community that cares about such things, indignation or delight, because the battle lines have been drawn, it seems—demands issued, sops and reassurances offered—and little has changed.

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Laura Miller in Salon:

When we love characters in popular fiction, we really, really love them. We dress up like Scarlett O’Hara or Harry Potter on Halloween, we make pilgrimages to Baker Street in search of 221B, we join groups dedicated to the admiration of Batman and ask ourselves over and over again what Holden Caulfield would do. In the case of series fiction, the creator of such a character often tires of him or her long before the public does, as happened to both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, who grew well and truly sick of Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells. And, finally, inevitably, we run out of books. Even the singularly prolific P.G. Wodehouse was only human, and sad is the day when the devotee of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves, finishes the very last unread volume of that immortal oeuvre. It’s no surprise then that publishers often contemplate having another writer extend a particularly successful fictional franchise. Also unsurprising is the tendency of such efforts to fall flat. Alexandra Ripley was no Margaret Mitchell, and even if she was licensed by Mitchell’s estate to continue the story of “Gone With the Wind,” the original novel’s fans (they call themselves Windies), were unenthused by the results.

Lately, though, publishers have been pulling out some mighty big guns in the series revival game. This fall, two celebrated British novelists, Sebastian Faulks (“Birdsong”) and William Boyd (“Any Human Heart”) have published a new Jeeves and Wooster and a new James Bond novel, respectively. Come spring, the Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville will publish a new Philip Marlowe novel under the pseudonym he uses for his own detective fiction, Benjamin Black. All three of these authors can be counted among the most esteemed British literary novelists alive today — which is a far cry from pen-for-hire jobbers like Ripley.

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Marie Daniels in PhysOrg:

Scientists have moved a step closer to understanding genetic changes that permitted humans and other mammals to develop such big brains.

Dr Humberto Gutierrez, from the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK, led research which examined the genomes of 39 species of mammals with the aim of better understanding how brains became larger and more complex in mammals. To do this, the scientists focussed on the size of gene families across these species. Gene families are groups of related genes which share similar characteristics, often linked with common or related biological functions. It is believed that large changes in the size of gene families can help to explain why related species evolved along different paths. The researchers found a clear link between increased brain size and the expansion of gene families related to certain biological functions. Dr Gutierrez said: “We found that brain size variations are associated with changes in gene number in a large proportion of families of closely related genes. These gene families are preferentially involved in cell communication and cell movement as well as immune functions and are prominently expressed in the human brain. Our results suggest that changes in gene family size may have contributed to the evolution of larger brains in mammals.”

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Clive Thompson in Wired:

“There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,” Bill Gates wrote this summer. That’s quite an endorsement—and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’s biggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy books you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)

His conclusions are often bleak. He argues, for instance, that the demise of US manufacturing dooms the country not just intellectually but creatively, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. (And, unfortunately, he has the figures to back that up.) WIRED got Smil’s take on the problems facing America and the world.

You’ve written over 30 books and published three this year alone. How do you do it?

Hemingway knew the secret. I mean, he was a lush and a bad man in many ways, but he knew the secret. You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.

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Zadie Smith in the NYRB:

One September night, running home from dinner to meet a babysitter, I took off my heels and hopped barefoot—it was raining—up Crosby Street, and so home.Hepatitis, I thought. Hep-a-ti-tis. I reached my building bedraggled, looking like death. The doorman—who’d complimented me on my way out—blushed and looked down at his smart phone. In the lobby, on a side table, sat a forlorn little hard-backed book. The World’s Masterpieces: Italian Painting. Published in 1939, not quite thirty pages long, with cheap marbled endpapers and a fond inscription in German: Meinem lieben Schuler…. Someone gave this book to someone else in Mount Carmel (the Israeli mountains? the school in the Bronx?) on March 2, 1946.

The handwriting suggested old age. Whoever wrote this inscription was dead now; whoever received the book no longer wanted it. I took the unloved thing to the fifteenth floor, in the hope of learning something of Italian masterpieces. Truthfully I would much rather have been on my iPhone, scrolling through e-mail. That’s what I’d been doing most nights since I bought the phone, six months earlier. But now here was this book, like an accusation. E-mail or Italian masterpieces?

As I squinted through a scrim of vodka, a stately historical process passed me by: Cimabue, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo, Raphael, Michelangelo. Dates of birth and death, poorly reprinted images, dull unimpeachable facts. (“The fifteenth century brought many changes to Italy, and these changes were reflected in the work of her artists.”) Each man more “accurate” with his brush than the last, more inclined to let in “reality” (ugly peasants, simple landscapes). Madonnas held their nipples out for ravenous babies and Venice was examined from many different angles. Jesus kissed Judas. Spring was allegorized. The conclusion: “Many changes had taken place in Italian art since the days of the great primitive, Cimabue. The Renaissance had opened the way for realism and, at last, for truth as we find it in nature.”

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Mike Konczal reveiws Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste in The New Inquiry:

In 1978, in a series of lectures at the Collège de France, philosopher Michel Foucault told the gathered students that they should start reading University of Chicago economists. Almost 30 years before management consultants like Tom Peters would start promoting the value of people measuring their own human capital, Foucault walked his audience through obscure journal articles on the economics of the self by the idea of human capital’s intellectual progenitor, Gary Becker.

Decades before neoliberalism would become a widespread intellectual crutch word, Foucault declared, “Neoliberalism is not Adam Smith; neoliberalism is not market society.” So what is it then? What are the term’s stakes? And why does the condition it describes seem to lumber on despite the economic devastation of the past five years, which might have spelled its definitive end? This question forms the core of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, the most recent book by economic historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski.

Mirowski’s book can be thought of as two long essays stitched together. The first is about defining what neoliberalism is and what it is not, as well as a background history on the institutions that have come to be associated with it. The second documents where the economics profession stands in the aftermath of the financial crisis: how it has resisted reform and may even be beyond it, despite economists’ embarrassing failures.

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Deborah Friedell reviews a biography of Bezos in the London Review of Books:

What he liked about books was that they were ‘pure commodities’: copies of the latest Stephen King sold online would be no better or worse than those sold in shops. But no actual shop was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled distribution for most American publishers: Bezos wouldn’t have to make separate deals with each publishing house. Books also came assigned with International Standard Book Numbers and were catalogued on CD-ROM: that would save time, and Bezos was in a hurry.

The company’s motto was ‘Get Big Fast’. The Amazon isn’t just the largest river in the world: it’s larger than the next seven largest rivers combined. Bezos preferred the name Relentless.com, but friends persuaded him that it sounded sinister. (Type Relentless into an address bar and you still get directed to Amazon.) He also considered Bookmall.com (but he knew that soon enough he wouldn’t only be selling books) and Cadabra.com (sounded too much like ‘cadaver’). Naturally he couldn’t set up the business in New York – too many potential customers lived there, and he didn’t want to charge them all sales tax – but somewhere isolated would make it difficult to hire engineers. The compromise was Seattle: at least Microsoft was nearby.

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Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

It takes Satan to bring out the true spirit of Thanksgiving. That's because it can be hard to give thanks unless you know why you are doing it. Plenitude is lovely. Abundance is a delight. I think of the famous painting by Norman Rockwell. A large American family sits around a comfortable table as the venerable mother carries a moose-sized turkey as the centerpiece. The painting was originally titled “Freedom from Want” and was part of Rockwell's Four Freedoms series, meant to promote the buying of war bonds during World War II. If there is an unsettling message hidden in the Rockwellian sentimentality, though, it's that these people, this nice American family, knows nothing of want. They are giving thanks for an abundance that is taken for granted.

When the devil is on your doorstep, however, thanks takes on a different timbre. The American most consistently preoccupied with thoughts of Satan was probably Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne never trusted in the good times. He saw the devil lurking in every moment of pleasure, waiting for the chance to pounce on the unsuspecting reveler when his guard was down. Hawthorne's story, “John Inglefield's Thanksgiving,” is appropriately evil-obsessed. Utterly bleak, it is a difficult fit in the traditional American story of goods asked for, goods delivered, thanks given.

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