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The Book Cover That Judges You Back, and Other News

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On the Shelf

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Anyone who regards this cover with an iota of judgment on his face will be forbidden to access it. Photo via the Guardian

  • Two “virile” bronze figures—a pair of totally ripped guys riding ferocious panthers—may be the work of Michelangelo, experts say. If their research is accurate, these would be Michelangelo’s only surviving bronzes. “In addition to welcoming new input from outside researchers between now and summer, those currently involved in the project will undertake further research of their own. Mr. Abrahams, for example, plans to meet with a bodybuilder to compare his physiognomy to that of the sinuous statues.”
  • Today in power reclamation: a book that judges you by your cover, thus standing up for books everywhere. “Thijs Biersteker of digital entrepreneurs Moore has created a book jacket that will open only when a reader shows no judgment. An integrated camera and facial recognition system scans the reader’s face, only unlocking the book … when their expression is neutral.”
  • This weekend in Moscow, one of the Russia’s largest libraries, the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences, caught fire—but firefighters were able to save a quasi-miraculous 85 percent of the books. “The books did not suffer,” the director told the press.
  • A new biography on T. S. Eliot’s earlier years reassesses his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood “as a union between two profoundly damaged people, each of whom believed they could be a healer for the other: a dire recipe for a happy marriage. Eliot wrote a good deal later that ‘all I really wanted of Vivienne [both of them sometimes used this spelling] was a flirtation or a mild affair.’ ”
  • Living in the Future is a magazine that “calls for rapprochement between the art world and the subculture of the science fiction magazine … The magazine embraces the strange and deranged aspects of science fiction which stand apart from the reasoned, cognitive tradition associated with the writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, with their engineer stories and defiantly flat characterization.”