Aiming to write “with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it,” Stanley Fish says a “desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power” is “what blogs and the digital humanities stand against.”

John Brockman characterizes Edge.org, the online forum he created with the late performance artist James Lee Byars, as a way for readers to “look over the shoulders of some extraordinarily gifted individuals as they go back and forth in the battle of ideas.”

On the coffee table book, The Collected Jokes of Slavoj Zizek, created by Auden Mortensen and published in a limited edition of one.

In an age of 140-character tweets and infographics, longform or narrative journalism is alive and well, GOOD reports, linking up sites that specialize in meaty, in-depth writing.

Oscar Wilde’s tombstone is getting a cleaning and, to the dismay of some, a barrier to bar the kind of rampant grave-smooching that’s been going on since the poet died in 1900. “We’re not saying, ‘Go away,’ but rather, ‘Try to behave sensibly,’” says Wilde’s grandson.

Dissident playwright, Velvet Revolution figurehead, and former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel has died at age 75. A writer who decried the “political apartheid” under Communist rule, he was Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president.

Empire Falls author Richard Russo enlists top writers in questioning an Amazon program that gives discounts to those who use its price-check app at independent bookstores and notes that the “strategy has the potential to morph into a genuine Occupy Amazon movement.”

Bold, italic, sarcastic: Given how hard it is to convey intonation in text-based communications, a typographer has come up with the “Sarcastic Font”, “a typeface that renders sarcastic comments in reverse italic script.”

Sociologist Steven Tepper’s study of 805 US cases of conflict over art finds that “when people feel unsettled by the rate of social change … art becomes something that they fight over as a way to reassert their values.”