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.”

Chile’s Communist Party wants Pablo Neruda’s body exhumed to determine how he died. The legendary poet’s official cause of death is prostate cancer, but his assistant alleges that he was poisoned in 1973 on the orders of Augusto Pinochet.

“They look like large birdhouses and act like water coolers. But the sustenance stored inside the wooden, windowed boxes is a blend of knowledge and recreation.”

A new NEA survey finds there of 2.1 million artists in the U.S. workforce, some 42,000 living here in the Land o’ Lakes. Other findings: Minnesota leads the nation in the concentration of jobs in book publishing, and the Twin Cities’ concentration of theater jobs is twice the national average.