British book thieves are abundant, quirky.

Some people steal cars, others jewelry. But the inner geek in some thieves has them gravitate toward their local bookstore for a little bit of Freddy Fast Fingers action.

According to The Guardian, British bookstores report that theft hasn't abated despite security measures, but yet they also accept book loss as a way of life. "[The thieves are] simply reselling them on eBay," says James Daunt, the chief executive officer of Waterstones.

Daunt believes Waterstones kleptomaniac clientele tends to be the high-minded, intellectual type, as they tend to steal the textual works of philosophers. "Whenever I’d go past Kierkegaard I’d make sure they and Wittgenstein were all there, but often the odd one or two would be gone and it always made me smile."

Elsewhere in the country, tastes vary. In the small industrial town of Walsall at Southcart Books, it's Anton LeVey's Satanic Bible being pinched as some light reading. In Oxford at Blackwell's, it's J.R.R. Tolkien (he taught at Oxford University after all) and George R.R. Martin's works going out the door unpaid. And at The Beckenham Bookshop in Beckenham along with City Books in Hove, both notice Beatrix Potter is a favorite freebie to be snatched.

But John Clepp of the London Review Bookshop recounts one thief who asked for some understanding for their thieving ways:

"We caught a gent last Christmas with £400-worth of stolen books in his trousers and elsewhere. We grabbed all of the bags back, but he returned about half an hour later to reclaim a half-bottle of whisky and his dream journal, which had been at the bottom of one of the bags of stolen books. As we showed him the door he told us: 'I hope you’ll consider this in the Žižekian spirit, as a radical reappropriation of knowledge.'"

If it was quality whisky, can you blame him?

Ayn Rand won't go away.

She's getting irked because she saw someone do something nice.

Ayn Rand is either a philosopher, a genius, and a skilled writer,

OR

She's a selfish, frightening, and a miserable hack at making books.

Either way, she's as popular as ever.

The way you view her says as much as your view on literature as it does your own personal moral compass. While Rand wrote two novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, it is her creation and development of a philosophical movement of Objectivism--featured in her two books--that keeps her memory alive 35-years after her death.

Did you just ask her for a cookie? Did you??

While her philosophy's scope darts in a dozen directions, one area stands forth today. In layman's terms, Objectivism argues that people should be selfish for their own personal betterment, and that personal self-interest in the only proper moral action. In essence, Objectivism bristles at altruistic behavior, and finds nothing good in doing good deeds for others. Want to eat that last cookie instead of sharing it? Objectivism would tell you to have it all for yourself, then buy a new bag of Oreos and refuse to share them with your friends or loved ones. Keep those cookies away from the hungry people most, too.

Put another way, it's a fancy way to explain being greedy.

A how-to guide on how to be mean!

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with London's Guardian newspaper, focused on how Rand's philosophy has been embraced with open arms by the current La Casa Blanca administration and executives in Silicon Valley, with believers like Donald Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, House Speaker Paul Ryan, the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, and even the deceased Steve Jobs, who called Atlas Shrugged one of the "guides of his life." It seems Ayn Rand is more popular in death than she ever was in life.

Says Freedland:


"No wonder the tech companies don’t mind destroying, say, the taxi business or the traditional news media. Such concerns are beneath the young, powerful men at the top: even to listen to such concerns would be to betray the singularity of their own pure vision. It would be to break Rand’s golden rule, by which the visionary must never sacrifice himself to others.

[...]

Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever."


If, by chance, you feel the allure of Ayn Rand and Objectivism slowly wooing you, like you wouldn't mind being selfish and only praising yourself, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a quick comedic segment a couple seasons ago asking why Ayn Rand was still a thing:





Why IS Rand a thing? Because selfishness is a thing, and selfishness is easy.

That said, slogging through a thousand pages of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead is hard. Be selfish and refuse to subject yourself to them.

Aristotle would be eating a lot of ramen if he were alive today. And not the boutique restaurant kind.

Forbes Magazine caters to the wealthy, the kinda wealthy, and the really bored people in a doctor's office who can't bear the idea of reading another Reader's Digest.

Which explains why Forbes would have an article detailing the college majors least and most likely to have millionaires as an alumnus. Turns out Kierkegaard would be panhandling if he was alive today.

Researches at WealthInsight analyzed data on over 100,000 high net worth individuals with assets of $1 million or more--and philosophy majors made up the least of them.

The list:

1.  MBA (12.1%)
2.  Engineering (10.7%)
3.  Economics (8.2%)
4.  Business studies/business administration (5.9%)
5.  Law (4.7%)
6.  Accountancy (2.9%)
7.  Finance (2.1%)
8.  Management (2.0%)
9.  Commerce (1.9%)
10.  Computer science (1.9%)
11.  Politics (1.3%)
12.  Mathematics (1.1%)
13.  Medicine (1.0%)
14.  Physics (0.9%)
15.  Chemistry (0.9%)
16.  History (0.8%)
17.  Marketing (0.7%)
18.  Biology (0.6%)
19.  Psychology (0.6%)
20.  Philosophy (0.6%)

Consider me stunned that those in the world of business, finance, commerce, accountancy, economics--everything that makes a worldwide business flourish and make the affluent richer--somehow dominate the top ten and would produce the most millionaires. Goodness! You might think there was some sort of incestuous relationship between it all!

You might ask where English majors are on this list. The cynic in you might suggest not oven 0.6% of them are millionaires. Your inner Negative Nancy might suggest writers are starving artists because, well, they are starving. The pessimist in your soul would suggest English majors must be a sad lot.

And you'd be right. But we're not sad. Just broke.

The Open Syllabus Project lists all the college textbooks students are dutifully ignoring.

Reading! I meant reading. Excuse me. Silly mistake. The Open Syllabus Project is trying to document all the college textbooks students are reading and studying with a fervent passion, no doubt.

Specifically, the Open Syllabus Project (OSP) hopes to comb over the world's college syllabi and document which books students are assigned most, regardless of subject area. The list is ever-changing, as the OSP gathers more syllabi, texts gain and lose favor.

For example, the top ten most-assigned books covering all syllabi (so far) and subject areas in parts of the western hemisphere are:

1.  The Elements of Style,
     by Strunk, William, 1869-1946
2.  Republic,
     by Plato
3.  The Communist Manifesto,
     by Marx, Karl, 1818-1883
4.  Biology,
     by Campbell, Neil A., 1946
5.  Frankenstein,
     by Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851
6.  Ethics,
     by Aristotle
7.  Leviathan,
     by Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679
8.  The Prince,
     by Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527
9.  Oedipus,
     by Sophocles
10.  Hamlet,
     by Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616

The Elements of Style is hopelessly assigned by every desperate English professor in hopes that someone, anyone--you maybe--might be able to write a coherent sentence in a paper. It's fruitless, as every student leaves Elements in a desk drawer or closet, where it'll only be rediscovered when they graduate, clear out those closets, and donate a stack of books to the Goodwill.

The rest of the top ten is fairly explanatory. A basic biology book, some philosophical musings you won't remember, a dash of Shakespeare...and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? The same desperate English professor who cries to sleep each night over your writing inability also hopes you'll read a little, and assigned a relatively short book with a famous name, dreaming you'll give it a shot. You won't though. That's why God made Wikipedia.

Curiosities really don't appear until you break down the syllabi by county, state, school, or subject area. Take Canada, for instance. Our neighbors to the north's top ten includes the usual--your Leviathans and Ethics--but has Frankenstein number one. Further raising eyebrows is Michel Foucault's Power at number two, while Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness shows up at number ten. Is the collective subconscious of Canada suggesting they want to control and dominate the world? Damn right. I, for one, welcome our new Canadian overlords, and bid them well.

Another mystery is the state of Alabama--and not just because it's the state of Alabama. A look at that state's top ten textbooks starts with the first seven being related to physics, with an eighth book related to astronomy. Did Alabama just discover the existence of science and the cosmos? No. That's silly. Because Alabama realized science existed all the way back in 2012, and there's been rumors of a moon in the sky being reported in Mobile all the way since the 1960s. It's just that Alabama is buying the books now to burn them.

I'm not sure if that's better than ignoring them though.

'Charlotte's Web' reimagined with Albert Camus instead of Charlotte.

American xenophobia means if you mention the name Albert Camus to 100 of your fellow citizens, 99 of them won't have a clue who you're talking about. The one person who does know is very likely related to Albert Camus, and even then they're probably probably going to hesitate before saying yes.

But good ol' Al is a stalwart standby here, mainly because of the way he died--yet he won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and made a name for his depressing view of the world and a fantastic ability to chain smoke.

So someone over at McSweeney's decided to reimagine Charlotte's Web, swapping out Charlotte the spider with Albert the philosopher.

And just like Camus, the story is short, to the point, and a little bit delightfully absurd.

Philosopher accused of plagiarizing white separatist journal. No, really.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the world's leading modern philosophers, a scholar and thinker with a tendency to call his students "boring idiots" who write "shitty papers." In other words, he's subtle.

Now Slavoj Žižek is being accused of plagiarism, and not for stealing from Noam Chomsky or Aristotle--but a white separatist magazine called American Renaissance, which I imagine is only the classiest of white separatist magazines.

A blogger found the nearly identical passages between the philosopher and American Renaissance in which Žižek allegedly plagiarizes heavily, a giant swath of copying largely unseen outside of a lazy 5th-grader's essay on the War of 1812.

NPR reached out to Žižek, who replied via email that a friend of his wrote the passages in question, and that he--Žižek--didn't plagiarize at all. "As any reader can quickly establish, the problematic passages are purely informative, a report on another's theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever; [...] In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of 'stealing ideas.' I nonetheless deeply regret the incident."

Deny, deny, deny--and then drop in a "thus" and a "deeply regret"--it's straight out of the elitist academic public relations plan. But Žižek continues with the charm, going full-on CAPS when he replies to NPR again, really driving home the point that he's entirely not to blame.

"I find it difficult to consider plagiarism using a brief resume of a book written by a friend FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF ME USING IT. If this is plagiarism, then quite a few academics I know are plagiarists," Žižek writes.

Throwing everyone under the bus is straight out of the Panic 101 handbook. Apparently the key to not writing "shitty papers" is to allegedly steal from the upper crust of white separatist journals--all while being a deadbeat and having your friend do all the work.





photo: The Guardian



Doesn't Žižek kind of look like a lower-level James Bond villain from the 1970s? Not the mastermind thwarting Bond, but some Eastern European strongman with a group of henchman that die way too easily at the sight of a British secret service agent?

Famous Writers with Cats: Jacques Derrida

Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet cats.

This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their feline companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.

Today:  Jacques Derrida

Sometimes a cat is the only thing that can put up with a French philosopher's musings.

Clearly the cat is just as freaked out as anyone should be by the creepy, vacant stares coming off those statues in the background. Don't look into their eyes! Turn away!!

Famous Writers with Cats: Jean-Paul Sartre

Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet cats.

This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their feline companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.

Today:  Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre does a good job as stenographer, dutifully jotting down Mr. Whisker's thoughts on existentialism.

"Existence precedes essence," Sartre once wrote--channeling the deepest thought ever written on the side of a bag of Friskies.

Russian man shot in grocery store during argument over the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Naturally.

Book Review: A Week at the Airport, by Alain Botton

This is part of the continuing series of random book reviews that'll be nothing like a New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.

The book: Alain Botton's A Week at the Airport.

Blend together only the best parts of a philosophy class with a major, European-hub airport. Then add some wannabe National Geographic photography.

It's better than I make it sound. A lot better.

Better than a economy flight or a philosophy class, too.

Plato = top 40 radio gold, baby!

You can't read some of the classical Greek philosophers and not immediately imagine Socrates breaking into some hip-hop rhythms, or maybe someone hitting the country music circuit. "Achy Breaky Heart"? That has Aristotle written all over it.

That's why it comes not a moment too soon to see some of Plato's work inspire some top 40 music.

It's popularly believed that Mumford & Sons latest single, "The Cave," is a cover version of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave."



Uhhhh, sure. Why not? I always love a good cover song. Plato is going to love the royalty checks that come in from this.