William Gibson, who launched the cyberpunk genre with the 1984 classic Neuromancer, hasn’t lost any steam. Pattern Recognition, published a good 20+ years later, won wide praise in 2005. Now, he’s come out with Spook Country, and it’s currently #66 on the Amazon bestseller list.

Here’s a quick fyi for classical music lovers…
OnClassical.com has just relaunched its website, and you may want to give a look. If you don’t already know about it, OnClassical is an independent classical music label based in Italy that features internationally-acclaimed artists.

It didn’t seem like an obvious blockbuster at first — at least not to me — but The Grammar Girl (iTunes – Feed – Web Site) has remained one of the most downloaded educational podcasts on iTunes.

We asked our readers what books made the biggest difference in their lives, and here’s what they had to say. The list below tells you what books shaped their lives and why.

1984 – George Orwell
1984 “was the first book I actually enjoyed reading.

“Subtract the following 2,400 hours from history and you’d have no mp3s, no LSD, no hip–hop, no soul–sucking corporate rock — actually, can we erase that last one? Blender presents the most earth–shakingly important days in music, ever.”
Here are the top 10. Make sure you see the full list.
10.

Strange culture we live in these days. It’s the comedians that ask the hard questions. See John Stewart below and the referenced Dick Cheney video below that.

The latest podcast put out by The Chronicle of Higher Education (iTunes – Stream – Web Site) doesn’t shy away from hot-button issues. Below, we’ve pasted the summary that accompanies the podcast on The Chronicle’s web site. Read it and then give the audio some time and thought.

We talk a good deal about virtuous podcasts here. But this episode of The Brian Lehrer Show (iTunes – Feed – Web Site) coming out of NYC, focuses on the downright embarrassing songs that you have hidden on your iPod. And they talk about it with Kelefa Sanneh, the pop music critic from The New York Times.

In 2006, we learned that staff members on Capitol Hill logged into Wikipedia and gave a partisan air-brushing to the biographies of various Congressmen and Senators.

Here’s another example of podcasts that bring the past back to life. Thanks to Michigan State University, you can listen to audio recordings of twenty modern American presidents (iTunes – Feed – Web Site), starting with Grover Cleveland (1892) and ending with GWB.