Links for 2012-03-15

Welcome to Moxie Madness 2012: Misery Poker Tournament! 64 mothering calamities go mano-a-mano in a single elimination tournament like you’ve never seen before. Only one mothering problem can be the champion… Vote for which problem is worse in a series of shoot-from-the-hip head-to-head matchups that will leave you breathless. First matchups start Thursday. Final Championship Match April 2. Are you ready to rumble?

A bit buried in last week’s iPad 3 excitement was the news that Apple, along with five major American book publishers, was given notice by the Justice Department that it’s about to be sued for colluding to raise prices. A tech giant can afford to shrug off something as petty as an anti-trust lawsuit over books, but for HarperCollins, Penguin, MacMillan, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster (full disclosure: my publisher) the implications are potentially quite dire. Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, went further and argued that “everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture” should be alarmed by the DOJ’s actions. He’s wrong. If there’s a case against the government’s actions it’s that the forces of disruption buffeting traditional publishing are much too large to be blocked by any cartel. The good news is that literary culture should survive either way.

TODAY is my last day at the Empire. ‘I no longer have the pride, or the belief’ After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. To put the problem in the simplest terms, throttling people with your mind continues to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making people dead.