Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

BOO HOO: Publishing industry to cut most executive perks in 2009
One of the most sinfully enjoyable articles that I as a basement publisher have come across in months: Loads of details of all the pointless expensive perks that publishing executives have been enjoying over the last decade, off the sweaty backs of the hapless authors they signed, and how all those perks will be disappearing in 2009. Executive retreats in Bermuda for Random House employees...spa treatments for Macmillan sales staff...holiday parties at Tavern On The Green for Simon & Schuster editors...say goodbye to all those things, and maybe hello for the first time in decades to smart, reasonable goals from these publishing companies, instead of ones driven by the ridiculously overinflated expectations of other corporate-owned entertainment outlets like movie companies. Maybe this will finally see less "DaVinci Code"s from this industry, and more common sense? We can only hope, I guess.

RNC official: "Chair election has already nearly split party in two"
I've been predicting since November something a little outrageous-sounding, but that believe it or not has historical precedence -- that the upcoming vote for chairman of the Republican Party later this month will become so mired down by the issue of uneducated white southern Evangelical racists, the party will literally split into two groups, with basically whichever side the racists taking becoming eventually a regional crackpot single-issue party, and the other side becoming the next predominant political party in the US for conservatives. Here, an article from Politico confirming everything I just said, including the efforts by the Evangelicals to manipulate who exactly within the party will even be allowed to vote for chairman in three weeks.

Corrupt Obama cabinet pick quits before he's even confirmed
And it's no less than New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, too, who ran unsuccessfully for President himself last year, the first serious Latino candidate in American history to do so; turns out that he's merely one of hundreds upon hundreds of American politicians in the last decade to come under fire for a "pay to play" scheme involving government contracts. Make no mistake, he's not quitting for "the good of the Obama administration," as he put it in his press conference; it's more that he and his team of weasel lawyers sat around parsing the situation for a month, trying to decide whether his confirmation could withstand the scrutiny of the investigation. That's American politics in a nutshell right now -- a bunch of corrupt, inept shysters sitting around rooms with teams full of lawyers, not doing any of the job they were hired to do as long as their team tells them it's a "political liability" to do so. Welcome to the collateral damage of the Bush years.

Taplin: "Is advertising the crutch falsely propping up late-period capitalism?"
Futurist Jon Taplin, who I'm a big fan of, pens yet another fascinating editorial, pointing out statistics that show just how out of control the American marketing industry has gotten -- for example, that a $7 bottle of detergent only costs $1 to make anymore, yet barely pulls a profit because of all the advertising needed; that last year GM spent a quarter-billion dollars a month in ads to sell a quarter-million cars, or a thousand bucks per car; that the average US supermarket now has 175 different kinds of salad dressings. In this endless shell game of buying and selling that we're now recognizing more and more late-period capitalism to be, he opines, maybe it's the actual making and buying and selling and displaying of the ads themselves that is more important than what the ads are advertising, that it's the ad industry itself that's become the main fuel behind the American economic engine. Food for thought.