Charles Fort:

This Encyclopedia Forteana anthologizes the cult hero’s four classic works on the strange, the unexplained, and the just plain weird: The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands. It features Fort’s complete, unabridged text and a subject index.

Here are the four books that invented our understanding of the paranormal. These are cult hero Charles Fort’s defining records of bizarre, haunting, strange, and inexplicable “facts” for which science cannot account: Frogs falling from the skies. Mysterious airships in an age before flight. Monsters. Poltergeists. Floating islands. Teleportation (a term Fort invented).

These are the works that moved novelist Theodore Dreiser to write: “To me no one in the world has suggested the underlying depths and mysteries and possibilities as has Fort. To me he is simply stupendous.”

Now, Fort’s classic investigations are newly collected with a preface by biographer Jim Steinmeyer. Complete with a full subject index, here is the definitive Fort anthology for our times.

The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort

On April 15, 2008 in San Francisco, Green Works brought together an English reverse graffiti artist and a critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker, to create an environmentally friendly work of art and a film about a philosophy of clean.

Click through to see the whole film.

Reverse Graffiti Project

Sloane Crosley's new book earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

This debut essay collection is full of sardonic wit and charm, and Crosley effortlessly transforms what could have been stereotypical tales of mid-20s life into a breezy series of vignettes with uproariously unpredictable outcomes. From the opening The Pony Problem to the hilarious Bring-Your-Machete-to-Work Day (which will ring true for any child of the early 1990s who played the first Oregon Trail computer game), Crosley is equal parts self-deprecating and endearing as she recounts her secret obsession with plastic ponies and the joys of exacting revenge via a pixilated wagon ride. In less capable hands, the subjects tackled—from unpleasant weddings of long-forgotten friends to horrendous first jobs—could have been a litany of complaints from yet another rich girl from the suburbs. But Crosley, who grew up in Westchester and currently lives in Manhattan, makes the experiences her own with a plethora of amusing twists: a volunteer job at the American Museum of Natural History leads to a moral quandary, and a simple Upper West Side move becomes anything but. Fans of Sarah Vowell's razor-sharp tongue will love this original new voice.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Event of the summer?

Premieres July 13.

(I would say "television event", but it's not TV, it's HBO.)

See also early coverage from last year, when filming was just getting underway.

HBO: Films: Generation Kill

Black, White, Wow.

Silent World by Michael Kenna

A scene from the 1980 film Teen Witch, which appears to be in development for a remake with Ashley Tisdale, to be released in 2010.

'Teen Witch' (1980)

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

Benjamin Zander on music and passion | Video on TED.com

This presentation feels akin to a new Disney ride: During your tour inside David Macaulay’s imagination, prepare to soar over Rome’s great monuments, raft within the human body’s circulatory system, and dismantle and rebuild the Empire State Building.

I fondly remember Macaulay's early books.

Watch for the mention of why hotel toilet paper is folded that way. I was also reminded of this:

Ira Glass: "Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."

Also:

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google.

The Way David Macaulay Works: Finding Ideas, Making Books and Visualizing Our World

At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, David Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still, readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work.

Cloud Atlas: A Novel

A new Alice Munro story.

Sally packed devilled eggs—something she usually hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy.

Deep-Holes