Event photo: Mary Swan and Anne Simpson at A Different Drummer

Authors Mary Swan and Anne Simpson dropped in for a read-and-greet at A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario.

Mary Swan and Anne Simpson enjoy some after-reading wine. (Photo courtesy of A Different Drummer Books.)

Nice book, Einstein

We hear a lot of talk about an arts-science divide in our culture, each side supposedly wary of and ill-informed about the other. But New Scientist is doing its bit to bridge the gap – the magazine has posted a feature on “life-changing books” as chosen by scientists.

Many of the choices are indeed rather technical in nature – Handbook of Mathematical Functions, The Idea of a Social Science, The Art of the Soluble – and a couple of sci-fi classics, from Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, turn up as well. Some other intriguing picks include Peter Singer’s animal-rights manifesto Animal Liberation (chosen by Jane Goodall), Alice in Wonderland (developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik), and Catch-22 (physicist Lawrence Krauss).

A dozen words for jerk

With his new satirical self-help title, author Martin Kihn counsels us to be more aggressive, and he took his own advice when titling the book: it’s called A$$hole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone and How You Can Too (Broadway/Random House).

That hook has scored Kihn a Q&A in Newsweek, but apparently the magazine thinks its sensitive readers cannot withstand the word “asshole” unless it’s spelled with dollar signs. Whenever the a-word comes up in the interview, writer Brian Braiker substitutes a euphemism, such as “family-unfriendly word that NEWSWEEK generally avoids.”

To his credit, though, Baiker has some fun with it, using a different euphemism every time one is called for – which is often. Here’s the full list.

• aggressively un-nice person
• curse word synonymous with “unbelievable jerk” that begins with the letter A
• epithet that begins with the first letter of the alphabet
• buttocks personified
• human derrieres
• scatalogical body part
• a-hole
• rectal
• orifice
• disagreeable people
• excretory opening
• scatalogical body part
• posterior portal
• the word we have refrained from printing thus far in this interview
• begins with A, you figure it out