Inside Jacket

Term papers for cash: confessions from an academic mercenary.

Azar Nafisi, Chenjerai Hove, and Edwidge Danticat on the unexpected benefits of writing in exile.

Where to buy banned books—about sex, politics, and religion—in Jordan.

How human brains are hard-wired to understand metaphors.

Thieves abscond with a first-edition “Harry Potter” book worth six thousand pounds.

“Spillcam” and “vuvuzela” top the Global Language Survey’s list of the most commonly used words of 2010; the New Oxford American Dictionary names “refudiate” the word of the year.

New research suggests that good readers are bad at recognizing faces.

Lee Siegel mourns the lost art of the polemic.

Middlebury College defeats Tufts University in this year’s Quidditch World Cup.

To tweet or not to tweet? Betsy Lerner on how to publicize your book.

Michel Houellebecq wins France’s Prix Goncourt for his latest work, “La Carte et Le Territoire.”

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum pleads for the twenty-five thousand pounds needed to preserve the original manuscripts of three Charles Dickens novels.

Do offensive words become more powerful after they are banned?

Romeo and Juliet. Brad and Angelina. A new study finds that when we write about couples, we still tend to put the man’s name first.

Deborah Friedell wonders whether the world really needs two new biographies of Samuel Johnson.

Six poems to mark the end of daylight-saving time.

The Daily Beast ranks the twenty top-selling politicians in publishing.

Amazon awards a $15,000 grant to Shared Worlds, a fantasy and science-fiction writing camp for teen-agers.

Books by crooks: today’s protests over political books are puny compared to the furor surrounding Nixon’s memoirs.

The French Senate voted in favor of a law imposing a fixed price on e-books sold within French territory.

Nora Ephron on writing, sexism, and her new book, “I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections.”

Putnam will publish Jonathan Franklin’s “33 Men,” a book about the rescue of the Chilean miners.

How might Mick Jagger respond to Keith Richards’s new memoir?

What Yiddish got right: on the wonderful “schm” sound.

In the wake of the defeat of California’s Proposition 19, the Washington Post reviews three books about pot culture.

Downsizing: Random House may rent out as many as nine of its twenty-four floors of midtown office space.

Where have all the eccentric academics gone?

Jonathan Lethem explains the appeal of “They Live,” John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic film.

Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” tops Amazon’s list of the hundred “Best Books of 2010.”

The U.K. author Alan Shadrake faces jail time in Singapore over a book on the city-state’s death penalty.

“Good writing should be able to stand on its own, not on the literary strength of a country, and therein lies the challenge”: Kelvin Odoobo on how to be a writer in Africa.

With the departure of Irina Aleksander, the Observer loses its last female staff reporter.

Don’t write about me! The particular challenge of the unauthorized biographer.

The book-reader of Kabul: a reading list from General David Petraeus.

Furious fans protest Amazon’s price increases by giving books one-star reviews.

A Dutch court has ruled that “Hello Kitty”’s Cathy infringes the copyright of the “Miffy” children’s book series.

“More people have thought ‘Hamlet’ a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art”: who else but T.S. Eliot could question the artistic integrity of “Hamlet”?

Better yet, DON’T write that novel: Laura Miller speaks out against National Novel Writing Month.

William Blake wrote “London” in 1794, but his description fits New York or Washington in 2010.

Twelve philosophers on what drew them to philosophy.

Emma Donoghue’s “Room” wins the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Ronald and Bryan Williams, the founders of the rap music label Cash Money Records, plan to launch a book imprint called Cash Money Content.

How to get an author to sign your e-book.

Is Harry Potter responsible for the depletion of India’s wild owl population?

Ten art-book publishers to check out at the New York Art Book Fair this weekend.

On the A.C.L.U.’s legal battle to keep Amazon book sales private.

Stamp out hackneyed phrases with an online cliché finder.