Courtesy of Simon Critchley, who teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research…

Jonathan Lethem, the writer behind Motherless Brooklyn (one of my faves) and Fortress of Solitude, has a new book out, Chronic City. Above, he talks about the surreal quality of his work, the future of digital books, and the personal guidelines that determine what he writes, and won’t write.

A good find via Lifehacker. Maggwire is a relatively new site that will do two things for you. It will direct you to free magazine content online (a good thing). And (perhaps even better) it will learn what you like to read, and then start feeding you content based on your preferences.

Man, I love plutocrat humor in the morning…

A quick note: Paul McCartney’s album, Memory Almost Full, is going today for $2.99 on Amazon.

Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose and discussed the troubled state of scientific knowledge in America, and how it threatens our democracy.

This comes to us courtesy of TED Talks. Here, Itay Talgam, an Israeli conductor, talks about the art of leading an orchestra and shows the styles of six great 20th-century conductors. Ultimately, there are some general lessons here. Lessons about leadership. Give it a few minutes, and it gets going.

Earlier this week, we highlighted Snagfilms.com in our collection “20 Places to Watch Free Movies Online.” When you dig into their collection, you will find some well known, recent films, including Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Naomi Wolf’s The End of America.

David Simon once called his HBO series, The Wire, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” Think of it as a five season, 3600 minute, artistic depiction of the escalating breakdown of urban society. The show is art. But it is also life in the biggest sense.

News broke today that Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France’s towering intellectuals, has died. He was 100 years old. The New York Times has a lengthy obit that covers the career of the anthropologist who brought us “structuralism” and helped us look at diverse cultures in new ways.