Down with the blurb (at least a little): “Blurbs are a blight on the publishing industry, both for people seeking blurbs and the writers asked to blurb. I’m thinking of the swath of time and productivity of editors, agents, publicists, writers being sucked into the blurb machine. And while it can drive sales, as it’s meant to, it doesn’t necessarily do readers a favor … On the other hand, when I genuinely love an author’s work, or even if it’s problematic, or not fully formed, or I just hope to see more in the future, blurbing is a material way to donate my time to help a fellow writer eke out a living, especially if they are a debut author and/or publishing with a small press.”
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters brought him (and the subjects of this work) instant fame. That fame was short-lived. He died of a stroke at 36 in 1901.
Michael Dirda recommends giving books this Christmas but avoiding trendy best-sellers. I agree. Here’s his list of some of his favorite books this year.
In Harper’s, Janine di Giovanni reports on the eradication of Christians in the Middle East: “The majority of Iraqi Christians are ethnic Assyrians, who belong to the Catholic Chaldean denomination. They have roots in the region that go back two thousand years, and some claim that they can connect their family trees with the apostle Thomas, who came to Mesopotamia to evangelize during the first century. The Garden of Eden is believed by some researchers to have been in Iraq—sometimes drivers would tell me it was near the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon, south of Baghdad. Abraham came from Ur, a Sumerian city-state, which scholars believe was located two hundred miles outside the capital. I drove through the country, north to south, taking notes on an ancient culture I knew could disappear. The persecution of Christians in Iraq began as early as the thirteenth century. But in recent years it has reached a tipping point, setting off a mass exodus. In 2002, when I was living in Baghdad, six months before the US invasion, there were nearly 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Today there are between 250,000 and 300,000 left, according to Samuel Tadros, a fellow at the Hudson Institute.”
The world’s most successful cybercriminal: “When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev. The $3 million bounty the FBI has offered for Bogachev’s capture is larger than any that has ever been offered for a cybercriminal—but that sum represents only a tiny fraction of the money he has stolen through his botnet GameOver ZeuS. At its height in 2012 and 2013, GameOver ZeuS, or GOZ, comprised between 500,000 and 1 million compromised computers all over the world that Bogachev could control remotely. For years, Bogachev used these machines to spread malware that allowed him to steal banking credentials and perpetrate online extortion. No one knows exactly how much money Bogachev stole from his thousands of victims using GOZ, but the FBI conservatively estimates that it was well over $100 million. Meanwhile, Bogachev has spent lavishly on a fleet of luxury cars, two French villas, and a large yacht. Bogachev lives in the resort town of Anapa on the Black Sea, where Russian officials have declined for years to arrest him or extradite him to the United States.”
Essay of the Day:
The Chinese government deploys over 1 million spies to keep an eye on its own people. In the Associated Press, Dave Kang and Yanan Wang report on the shocking intrusiveness of the government’s “Pair Up and Become Family” program:
“The two women in the photograph were smiling, but Halmurat Idris knew something was terribly wrong.
“One was his 39-year-old sister; standing at her side was an elderly woman Idris did not know. Their grins were tight-lipped, mirthless. Her sister had posted the picture on a social media account along with a caption punctuated by a smiley-face.
“‘Look, I have a Han Chinese mother now!’ his sister wrote.
“Idris knew instantly: The old woman was a spy, sent by the Chinese government to infiltrate his family.
“There are many like her. According to the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, as of the end of September, 1.1 million local government workers have been deployed to ethnic minorities’ living rooms, dining areas and Muslim prayer spaces, not to mention at weddings, funerals and other occasions once considered intimate and private.
“All this is taking place in China’s far west region of Xinjiang, home to the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have long reported discrimination at the hands of the country’s majority Han Chinese.
“While government notices about the ‘Pair Up and Become Family’ program portray it as an affectionate cultural exchange, Uighurs living in exile in Turkey said their loved ones saw the campaign as a chilling intrusion into the only place that they once felt safe.”
Photos: Photos from above
Poem: Mary-Patrice Woehling, “Ad-venting”
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