By Christoph Niemann for The New Yorker. | Via | Previously: S.O.S, Japan’s Dark Spring

YouAreNotSoSmart | Via

For good parents that know early preparation is the key to survival.

Via

Newsweek | Via

Ads of the World | Via | See Also: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Update: The whole thing, in video form.

If getting Samuel L. Jackson to narrate an audiobook version of Adam Mansbach’s wildly popular “children’s book for adults” wasn’t great enough, you can also download it for free today through Audible.com.

Via AV Club, where they have some footage of Jackson recording the book.

Prior to his Calvin & Hobbes days, Bill Watterson had a 6-month trial gig drawing editorial cartoons for The Cincinnati Post, specializing in cartoons inspired by and including quotes by Mark Twain.  In an interview with Honk Magazine, Watterson describes the experience:

The agreement was that they could fire me, or I could quit with no questions asked if things didn’t work out during the first few months. Sure enough, things didn’t work out, and they fired me, no questions asked.

My guess is that the editor wanted his own Jeff MacNelly (a Pulitzer winner at 24), and I didn’t live up to his expectations. My Cincinnati days were pretty Kafkaesque. I had lived there all of two weeks, and the editor insisted that most of my work be about local, as opposed to national, issues. Cincinnati has a weird, three-party, city manager government, and by the time I figured it out, I was standing in the unemployment lines. I didn’t hit the ground running. Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman at the city’s other paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and I didn’t benefit from the comparison.

More at The Mary Sue.

Osama Bin Laden will be given TIME’s Red X treatment in this week’s issue.  Previous recipients include Saddam Hussein (April 21, 2003), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (June 19, 2006), and Adolf Hitler (May 7, 1945), who happens to share the same death date as Osama (May 1st).

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An excerpt from Go The Fuck To Sleep, by Adam Mansbach.

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the fuck to sleep.

Available for pre-order on Amazon. | Via

Zach Weiner is publishing his first book, Save Yourself, Mammal!, which will be a collection of his fantastic webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

SMBC has never released a book, which is almost unheard of for a comic with such an extensive archive. As such, there is a good deal of clamoring for a collection.

This collection is made up of comics from the first 2100, which have been hand-selected by the author for humor, poignancy, and mass appeal. As a bonus inducement, the pages of the book contain a miniature choose your own adventure with over 120 entries.

Pre-order it here.  He’s also doing an AMA on Reddit.

A collection of recently rediscovered Dr. Seuss material from the 1950′s will be sold as a new book this Fall by Random House, entitled The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories. From Publisher’s Weekly, via The Daily What:

Random enhanced the color palette of each story, and an introduction by Seuss scholar and collector Charles D. Cohen explains the significance of these seven stories, not only as lost treasures, but as transitional stories in Dr. Seuss’s career that marked the beginnings of his new philosophy about writing for children (these stories show a change from writing predominantly in prose to the rhyming style with which Seuss is now so closely associated).

You can preorder the book on Amazon now, but it won’t be released until September 27, 2011.

Available here. | Q&A with the authors here.

David McCandless for The Guardian:

Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics?  I scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100′s. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah’s Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of All Time. A  simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat ‘consensus cloud’ visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls.

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A new collection of drawings and poems by famed author Shel Silverstein will be released posthumously this September by HarperCollins Children’s Books with the title Every Thing On It.  Silverstein’s family members selected the works that will appear in the book.  Silverstein, who passed in 1999, is known for such children’s books classics as A Light In The Attic, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Giving Tree, which was turned into a Silverstein-narrated short film in 1973.

If you have children, September is the perfect time to be a good parent.

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By Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers from Heads of State:

Chapter four of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reads like a VIP guest list of the Jazz Age. Taking inspiration from those pages, this poster is comprised of the business cards and personal stationery of the movers and shakers that attended Gatsby’s parties in the summer of 1922.

The design comes complete with professions, story-specific addresses, old-time telephone exchanges, and a cameo card from a main character.

18 x 24 prints are available for purchase here. | Via

16 x 20 prints are available here.

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Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts | Threadless.com

Artist-driven clothing site Threadless celebrates its 10th year in business.  From their site:

Threadless.com is the phenomenally successful t-shirt company with millions and millions of tees sold since it began in 2000. It pioneered the online business model of crowd-sourced or community-driven design, in which people submit designs that are voted on by the site’s 1 million users and printed. Over the past 10 years, the company has amassed a vast archive of very cool, very hip, and often very entertaining designs, and Threadless is a spectacular showcase of 400 of the very best T-shirts created by the community–a barometer of art and design over the past decade.

Available here.

Ice Cream & Sadness | Cyanide & Happiness

The popular webcomic’s second book is filled with 120 of the authors’ favorite comics, along with 30 brand new, never-before-seen book exclusive comics.

Available here.

Trespass: A History Of Uncommissioned Urban Art | Marc and Sara Schiller

Marc and Sara Schiller (founders/editors of Wooster Collective) teamed up with Paper magazine senior editor Carlo McCormick and over 150 featured artists (including Shepard Fairey, Blu, and Bansky — who wrote the preface) to fashion a book that “certainly includes street art and graffiti, but goes beyond that to also address performance, protest, sculpture… and the whole goal of the book was to really look at the context of street art in a much larger historical perspective.”

Here they are talking about the book:

Available here.

Decoded | Jay-Z

Featuring one of Andy Warhol’s Rorschach paintings on the cover, Hov’s first book takes an intimate look at 36 songs from his deep-ass catalog by providing insight from the man himself into some of his more provocative and memorable lyrics.  He says:

When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.

Here he is speaking on his recently released “Most Kings”

Available here.

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Via The Daily What, which made some waves of its own in another well-known publication.  Congratulations.

Apparently, this is from the textbook used for the course “Reading in the Content Field”, a required course for students going for teacher certification at Washington College.

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I have no idea how the book will be, but the movie’s starting to look pretty damn good.

Out March 23rd.

Order | Via | Pt. 1

My copy of the TFLN book showed up on Friday so I had a full weekend to give it a pretty thorough look-over.  While it isn’t best suited for long car rides or casual reading,  it is definitely the consummate coffee table or “the basket next to the toilet” book.

The website and the book capture the thoughts of the texting generation, ranging from drunken introspective genius to all out toolish jackassery. That being said, it’s an easy read that requires no mental commitment whatsoever, which also happens to be one of its more endearing qualities (much like this blog).

Simply put, if you’re a fan of the site, you’ll like the book.

The Texts From Last Night book comes out January 26th. To pre-order, click here.  It’ll be $15.