John Steinbeck’s son is “deeply troubled” by the execution of Marvin Wilson, who had an IQ of 61, last night. He criticized Texas’ appeals court for using the Of Mice and Men character Lennie in its rationale for the appeal ruling.

This week’s feline foray goes literary: a blog dedicated entirely to photos of writers and their kitties. Atwood, Burroughs, Bukowski, Colette, Foucault, Lessing, Sartre—cat lovers all. Our fave: Aldous Huxley and cat contemplating a brave new world.

A NYC artist has created a “visual library” by photographing people reading on the subway. Riders featured on the Underground New York Public Library blog have been spotted reading books such as Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays and Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

In Somaliland, an independent republic in Somalia, 70 percent of the population is under 30. Seeking an alternative for this age group to chewing khat or enlisting with al-Shabaab, Jama Musse Jama has started a book fair, now five years old.

Occupy models micro-utopian thinking, says Columbia art school dean Carol Becker, helping us “rethink [our] relationship to each other and to the State.” But “it’s not a failure when such movements devolve; I would say rather it is a triumph that they exist at all.”

An Iranian student group aims to renew interest in a 23-year-old fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The state-sponsored group is developing a video game based on Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 call for the execution of the Satanic Verses author.