"So for five years, you're always on DEFCON 1, red alert" said Stewart of "The O'Reilly Factor's" historically sensationalist coverage of President Obama. "You finally have a few things that really look worth investigating," said Stewart. "Is it joy, is it sexual arousal? What is the feeling over there?"

O'Reilly then offered up some "educated speculation" on why the IRS profiled Tea Partiers as Stewart continued to gently mock Fox News, the "organization of Sauron."

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The online sales behemoth recently announced Kindle Worlds, a digital publishing platform devoted entirely to fan fiction.

From Amazon's Web site:

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

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While Dan Brown books are page-turners, they’re also littered with wordcount-boosting details, like the specific height of buildings or the exact make and model of Langdon’s current vehicle of choice. And let’s not even start on the bizarre mixed metaphors.

It’s pretty easy to make fun of Dan Brown. Just ask Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon, whose written-in-the-style-of-Dan-Brown "Inferno" review went viral last week. "Inferno" may have a ready-made readership of millions of "Da Vinci Code" fans, but it’s hard to deny that Brown’s writing style reads like a cross between a Wikipedia entry and the internal monologue of an art history professor.

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As Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles points out, the book blurb from the Washington Post on the front of Martin Amis' "Lionel Asbo" (which Charles did not review favorably) is so disingenuous, it borders on lying:

Amis is one of the finest stylists alive, but I thought “Lionel Asbo” was a bad novel. A really bad novel. In fact, my review of “Lionel Asbo” was a finalist for the Hatchet Job — a prize given for the most negative book review of the year. And yet, on the new paperback — on the front cover, no less — appears this ringing endorsement from The Washington Post: “Amis is a force unto himself ... There is, quite simply, no one else like him.”

All true. But caveat emptor. That line is drawn from a review of “London Fields” that my colleague Jonathan Yardley wrote ... 23 years ago.

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Packer's inspiration, as he explains in the book's afternotes, was the "U.S.A." trilogy by John Dos Passos, three novels that use a third-person choral method to portray American life in the early 20th century. "The Unwinding," while nonfiction, is narrative rather than polemical or analytic. Each chapter is a story, or an installment in a story, about a person or place. Some of the subjects are famous (Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) because such people, Packer writes, now "occupy the personal place of household gods, and they offer themselves as answers to the riddle of how to live a good or better life." But the key figures, the ones whose trajectories arc through the entire book like ribs or rafters, are unknowns: an African-American factory worker turned organizer in Ohio, a disillusioned lawyer who drifts from public service to finance and back again, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with extreme libertarian beliefs and a scion of North Carolina tobacco farmers trying to make it as an entrepreneur. In the book's most bravura chapters, the city of Tampa, Fla. serves as yet another character.

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Kieran’s father, 57-year-old Brian, had worked as a security guard in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. The day after Christmas 2011, Brian had a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his left side, blind in one eye, and unable to speak. He could no longer continue working to support his family, so he signed up for disability income from the British government.

That government, in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron since the 2010 elections, would prove no friend to the McArdles. Cameron claimed that hundreds of thousands of Britons were cheating the government’s disability system. The Department for Work and Pensions begged to differ. It estimated that less than 1 percent of disability benefit funds went to people who were not genuinely disabled.

Still, Cameron proceeded to cut billions of pounds from welfare benefits including support for the disabled. To try to meet Cameron’s targets, the Department for Work and Pensions hired Atos, a private French “systems integration” firm. Atos billed the government £400 million to carry out medical evaluations of people receiving disability benefits.

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What was so special about Jack?

Nothing, it turns out. What was so special, instead, was me — me and my autism. The connection between my autism and my poor athletic performance is pretty obvious in retrospect. At the time, though, I didn’t see it. Not until I was in my forties and I had the brain scan showing that my cerebellum — the part of the brain that helps control motor coordination — is 20 percent smaller than normal did I put two and two together. Now it all made sense! I couldn’t keep my skis together without falling because —

Because what? Because I’m autistic? Or because I have a small cerebellum?

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The Southern Vampire Mysteries -- which began in 2001 with "Dead Until Dark," and continued through 13 novels with hard-to-keep-straight titles and a dozen or so short stories and novellas -- is comfort reading of superior quality, made even more endearing by the series' longtime audiobook narrator Johanna Parker. As the series title suggests, these books, while typically shelved in the romance section, are actually whodunits. In each volume some annoying minor character gets killed, and by the end the culprit has been nabbed: serviceable plots, these, but certainly not the source of the series' charm.

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Or, at least, one of them does: Luhrmann’s indulgent, over-the-top adaptation misreads Fitzgerald’s novel, whereas Korine’s self-aware, sexed-up critique of a generation is, while unrelated plot-wise, a more faithful extension of the spirit of Gatsby.

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But this weekend on NPR's "All Things Considered," the latest stop on his celebratory media tour, Salter was asked by host Arun Rath about his women characters -- and he gave what might be as bizarre an answer as has any male writer these days, suddenly faced with direct questions about literature and gender that they might not have been asked before.

Here's the transcript:

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Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

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Now let’s consider another ubiquitous presence in modern life: The iPhone, which started out as a self-conscious statement of coolness but which, thanks to Apple’s marketing genius, has now become as commonplace as a set of car keys. Millions of people own iPhones, making use of hundreds of thousands of apps, whose functions range from GPS-assisted mapping to compulsively time-wasting computer games. Your iPhone does everything you could require of a mobile phone and more, so you really don’t need the upgraded model that Apple has just released ... do you?

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That afternoon, when I accepted the job as the head guide of the ghost tour on the retired ocean liner, the boss told me I could write my own content for the tour. Mr. Peterson said, “We love that you are creative. We think that’s so cool!”

I shook his hand and then I sat in the car and let go of a few tears. I had to. It was the first time anyone was paying me to write something and it was the worst kind of writing. Shameful, jokey, forgettable.

“Thank you for taking this job,” Laura said, without turning to look at me. “I know you don’t want it.”

“I don’t not want it. I want to do whatever I need to do.”

“Do you want to ever try again?” she asked, looking at her middle.

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The definitive expletive of the 18th century was bloody, which is still in frequent use in Britain today, and is so common Down Under that it is known as “the great Australian adjective.” Bloody was not quite an obscenity and not quite an oath, but it was definitely a bad word that shocked and offended the ears of polite society. It is often supposed to be a corruption of the old oaths by our lady or God’s blood (minced form: ’sblood), but this is another urban legend that turns out to be false. Either it derives instead from the adjective bloody as in “covered in blood” or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the 17th century, who styled themselves “bloods.” “Bloody drunk,” then, would mean “as drunk as a blood.”

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So how can a party built around the idea of pragmatism and compromise deal with issues whose defining feature is a deep and conflicting vision of what is right and wrong?

With pragmatism and compromise. Here is the fundamental insight: Reasonable people disagree about whether or not abortion should be illegal; but no reasonable person thinks that abortion is a good thing.

Reasonable people disagree about how readily guns should be available and what the requirements for purchase ought to be; but no reasonable person wants guns to fall into the hands of criminals or those who are dangerously mentally ill.

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On commutes like mine, the natural competitor of the audiobook is the podcast, and more than once I’ve turned off an audiobook in favor of “WTF with Marc Maron,” the twice-weekly podcast in which the stand-up comic and former Air America radio host interviews other comics, actors, musicians and writers. Maron now has a new memoir, "Attempting Normal," and naturally, the audiobook version cracks the form wide open, with features the hardcover can't match.

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The news prompted Moos to go on a media tour of her own, in which she spoke to TMZ, CNN and other networks of her surprise and support for the star. The personal trainer now has plans to capitalize on her ex's story with a memoir about his coming out experience. From her website:

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