The Millions

In what was surely one of the most fun experiments of all time, a team of Irish scientists have finally figured out why Guinness stout bubbles fall instead of rise.

GZA has teamed up with top cosmologists and physicists from MIT and Cornell to produce his latest album, Dark Matter. The album is the first in a series “designed to get a wide audience hooked on science.”

Read Russia 2012 aims to celebrate contemporary Russian literature and book culture, and they’ve scheduled a bunch of events in the NYC area to coincide with next week’s BEA. You should certainly check them out, as well as NYRB Classics’ ongoing coverage of their own Russian literature highlights. (You can get even more information over here, too.)

Over at Litreactor, Joshua Chaplinsky checks in with Two Dollar Radio, the publishing outfit responsible for Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, which was one of my Year In Reading selections last year.

I’ve mentioned my love for the movie recommendation site Netflixia before, but if you find its selection a little predictable or tame, you should give try out some of the titles on Christopher Higgs’ list of “The 50 Best Movies on Netflix Instant.” (Note: some of the list’s images might be a bit racy for work.)

The world’s great literature as comics and visuals. Though, as Steven Heller points out in The Atlantic, defining the canon is a contentious task, comics or no.

In this week’s  London Review of Books Elif Batuman has a great piece about Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, both the book and the place. It would pair well with our own Lydia Kiesling’s award-winning  essay on the book from 2010.

Laura Miller pokes some holes in that Dartmouth study about how little classic literature appears to be influencing contemporary writers.

Zadie Smith reading Frank O’Hara’s “Animals,” by way of the Chicago based ad and design agency, Coudal Partners, and their voice mail based poetry project, Verse by Voice.

Good news: There’s a new Alice Munro collection coming this fall.

The latest project from King’s Speech director Tom Hopper will be a big-screen version of Les Misérables, starring Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean and Russell Crowe as Javert. You can check out the trailer over here.

Julia Heaberlin, whose novel Playing Dead published this week, discusses the not-so-pretty truths of writing, rejection, and perseverance.