Laila Lalami

The leaders of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party will take their pledge of office in Belfast today. In the New York Times, novelist Colum McCann remembers growing up in Dublin, with a mother from the North and a father from the South.

I wanted desperately to know the “why” of Northern Ireland. My mother was raw and quiet with grief. “Ach, it’s just sad,” she said. My father told me that the answer was simple — all the murderers, hatemongers, kneecappers, bombers, were going to be herded onto a small floating island, and they would be pushed out to sea, whereupon they could kill and maim and tar-and-feather one another endlessly. The rest of us, he said, would be left in peace.

More here.

Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) writing in The New York Times:

I grew up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions — $3 billion a year in America alone.

Read on, to find out how knowledge is being patented, and by those who should know better.

53% of French voters have decided to let Sarkozy “water-hose” more “scum” from the cités.

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and for the occasion Issandr El Amrani contributed this great piece at the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free blog, about the threats faced by Egyptian journalists and bloggers. Here’s an excerpt:

Although it took time, Egypt’s zealous security services have begun to catch up with bloggers, as in the case of Abdel Kareem Soliman, a Muslim who lambasted his co-religionists after sectarian clashes in his hometown of Alexandria. Soliman ended up being sentenced to four years in prison for an anti-Muslim post he wrote, becoming a poster child for online freedom of speech. A few months later, Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, an Islamist blogger, was in turn arrested. While earning much less media coverage – as Islamist political prisoners generally do – Mahmoud’s case has now rallied much of the Egyptian blogosphere.

That unusual show of support for an Islamist in Egypt’s secularist-dominated blogosphere came in recognition that Mahmoud had broken ranks with the powerful political movement to which he belongs, the Muslim Brotherhood, and voiced support for Soliman despite disapproving of what he wrote.

Please read the article in full here.

I’ve had a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a long, long while, and I finally got to read it last week, on the plane to New York. It’s her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of a massive heart attack while their only daughter, Quintana, was in the hospital, receiving treatment for septic shock. (After the book was completed, but before its publication, Quintana passed away, in an almost unbearable post scriptum.) Didion chronicles the process of grief and mourning with stunning clarity, and many times I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. But there were also moments when I was frustrated by the sheer amount of control in the prose, as if the words could somehow serve as refuge from things Didion might not want the reader to know.

My apologies for the lack of posts these past few days. I’ve been busy with travel, and I’ve also been devoting whatever time I have to my novel. Posting should resume shortly.

The inimitable Tod Goldberg offers a write-up of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which took place last weekend. Here’s a snippet:

A popular misconception about Los Angeles is that it’s a town full of illiterate, fame-obsessed aspiring screenwriters whose most intense relationship with literature is Starbucks’ employee relations manual. Well, perhaps that’s not the most popular misconception — there’s the one about how pictures of your shaved genitalia appearing in US Magazine is actually a wise career move — but time and again Southern California is noted for being the Capitol of Vapid; a place where Norbit’s opening weekend is considered the high watermark of cultural talk. And while this may be true for the ten percenters who clog Wilshire Blvd. and the mail room denizens who spend their off hours speaking in Variety‘s Esperanto while in line at Baja Fresh, the hidden truth is that Los Angeles is a book town.

The empirical evidence is provided every April when the Los Angeles Times hosts their annual Festival of Books and Book Prizes ceremonies, a three-day celebration of the written word on the campus of UCLA. An average year features 150,000 readers, 500 authors, a hundred moderated panels, countless book signings, those weird people who believe Ayn Rand is a religious icon, those weird people who believe Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ caterwauling alien/human hybrid child is the messiah, my gut filled with churros and at least three of the following spectacles..

You’ll have to go over to Jewcy to read the rest. And check out the posts over at Pinky’s Paperhaus and Galleycat.