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It’s a strange time to live in Chicago.  On the one hand, we have a new President who has filled much of the country, indeed, much of the world, with an almost palpable sense of hope and optimism.

On the other hand, we have our governor. Our defiant, conniving, artfully tousled governor with a penchant for theatrics and language that seems even more out of place when printed on oversize poster board for the Illinois legislature to peruse. And frankly, I’m getting tired of the circus. Chicago is a wonderful city, and I’m not the only one to think so. A lot of great stories that have been written or filmed here in the Windy City, windbag politicians notwithstanding.

The FDA is still making headlines today with tales of contaminated spinach and suspect peanut butter, but we wouldn’t have an FDA at all if not for Upton Sinclair’s classic 1906 novel, The Jungle. Published during the same era (1900), Theodore Dreiser’s classic Sister Carrie shows our heroine running away to the big city of Chicago—even though without the Hancock building or Sears Tower, Carrie’s Chicago is a far cry from the skyline of today. Nobel laureate Saul Bellow placed The Adventures of Augie March (1953) smack in the middle of Chicago. And even if he did leave Hyde Park and the University of Chicago for a small town on the eastern seaboard later in life, well, he started here.

When it comes to nonfiction, who could forget the stories of Studs Terkel?  Terkel may have been born in NYC, but he grew up and lived his life in Chicago, and many of the remarkable stories that fill his noted oral histories are the lives of Chicagoans. And when it comes to downright creepy, it’s hard to top Erik Larson’s more recent Devil in the White City (2004) chronicling not only the 1893 World’s Fair held in Chicago but also the story of one of the first recorded serial killers. (That comes from the book reviews—yours truly walks to and from work at all hours of night and day, so I didn’t make it past the first 50 pages.)

And then there is the glorious world of film….how can we forget the ultimate high-school drama of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1985) filmed in the North Shore, Julia Roberts bringing her classic smile to 1996’s blockbuster romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, endless scenes of The El or the lakefront in the NBC medical drama ER (hurrah for George Clooney returning one last time!), or more recently the twists and turns of Heath Ledger’s inconic Joker in The Dark Knight? Rest assured, Lower Wacker Drive, site of the infamous car chase/tanker explosion scene, is every bit as unnerving in real life. Even the cabbies avoid going down there.

Is our now-convicted governor going to jail? My guess is yes, and either way I think I know what all of us here in Chicago will be discussing in the elevator for some time to come. But I also know that the Windy City is a great place to be. There are just so many stories.

The common cliché aside, book covers do matter, especially in allowing individual titles to distinguish themselves from the masses of books on store shelves and display tables. There’s also an undeniable aesthetic appeal in a well-designed book cover, something that, if considered on its own merits, doesn’t have to affect one’s opinion of the contents within. Like many bookish types, I enjoy the visual created by lining up the blue or black spines of my Penguin Classics or grouping together some brightly colored NYRB titles. Attempts have been made to turn book design into high art, with various exhibitions around the world, but for this post, I’ll be looking at the more pedestrian, consumer variety.

My favorite book-cover blog is The Book Design Review. Run by a fellow named Joseph Sullivan, TBDR takes a designer’s view of book covers, and many of the blog’s commenters are designers and artists as well. The questions asked are rather basic ones: Is this cover effective? Is it beautiful? What about it works? What doesn’t? But the resulting debates—about typography, how to show action through illustration, use of stock photos, which designers are at the top of the heap (John Gall, Paul Sahre, Henry Sene Yee), design trends, and so on—have caused me to look at book covers and book design in new ways, appreciating the aesthetics of a finely designed cover and learning something about the market imperatives that may drive design.

Now I find myself looking to see if I can spot design flaws or trends. One common trope, for American nonfiction books, is to use the subject of the book to create a map of the United States. When done well, as in the first example below, which was praised by TBDR, it can create a beguiling, thought-provoking image. But seen alongside several of the same type, the subject-as-America image seems tired and overdone, reminiscent of the seemingly unshakeable rule that all nonfiction books published in this country must have extensive explanatory subtitles, preferably declaring how the book’s subject, however obscure, changed the world—i.e. Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century’s Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All, Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life, or Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World Eats. And don’t forget: Flowers: How They Changed the World. These hyperbolic subtitles betray an irrational exuberance that only a paid marketing officer could fake. The effect with unoriginal book cover design may be slightly different, but it does offer this sense that there’s some sort of homogenization in play, in which we’re being told that everything is as dramatic, important, or foundational as everything else.

The end effect after looking at a scad of books with similar subtitles or “defining America” visual motifs is that some marketing departments believe that books can only be sold if they’re impressed upon the consumer as groundbreaking. The book is only worthwhile if it opens up some supposedly hidden, profoundly meaningful slice of life or history, like Freakonomics or one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books. Fortunately, with fiction, that kind of overwrought enthusiasm is conveniently isolated to the author blurbs, which are easily ignored, allowing designers more flexibility.

For an introduction to TBDR (which, to be fair, focuses more on aesthetics than harping on marketing schemes as I just did), I recommend taking a look at their favorite book covers of 2008. Before you go, feel free to post a comment with your thoughts on book design. Do book covers matter to you? Do you find yourself buying one edition of a book over another because of its cover? Is the whole subject moot because you only read on a Kindle?

Electronic books have been getting a lot of press in the past few weeks, what with the release of the Kindle 2 recently semi-announced and a host of competitors gearing up for a battle royale. Still, no one can really explain why you would want to pay $400 for something no smaller, no lighter, and no easier to read than a paperback.

1.Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold

This was the piece that started the recent flurry of articles about e-books. Beginning with the question, “Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels?” the authors survey the e-book landscape with an eager eye. Some interesting stats include: e-books account for less than 1% of total book sales; and the devices are most popular among the 55- to 64-year old age group (perhaps e-books are the new large print?)

2. Amazon Set to Rekindle Its E-Book Reader

Wired’s gadget blog gets deep into the specs of the Kindle 2. The piece also does a good job of laying out the e-book reader’s prospects in the heartland, which are heavily linked to Oprah’s endorsement of the gadget last October.

3. Can an iPod Touch Tablet Kill the Kindle?

MediaBistro’s publishing blog, GalleyCat, wonders whether the rumored big screen (7 to 9 inch) iPod Touch will kill the Kindle and other ebooks on the market. Current iPod and iPhone users can read books using software like Stanza and ScrollMotion, but the screen is seen as too small to really curl up with.

4. What’s the Kindle Worth to Amazon?

This somewhat wonky piece in the NYT’s Business section does some fancy math to speculate how much Amazon.com’s shareholders care about the Kindle. Turns out they care a lot. The authors of the piece think that Amazon is banking on an iPod-esque success for the Kindle, in which case they would control the e-book market, the same way iTunes dominates the download market.

This month, New York magazine ran a short—and surprisingly flat—piece on Charles Ardai’s new pulp novel, Fifty-to-One. Discerning readers will recognize Ardai as the mastermind behind the Hard Case Crime imprint, which has in recent years published a string of retro-noir books, including The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King, and Grifter’s Game, by Lawrence Block. (Fifty-to-One is the latest installment in the series.)

Author Carl Rosen notes that Hard Case Crime has been very successful, but he stops just short of any meaningful cultural analysis. Why, one might ask, have modern readers been drawn to a bygone world “of boxing broads, mobsters moored at sea, and graveyard horse races”? Nostalgia is the obvious answer: we long for that murky picaresque, where a man is a man and a gun is a gun and a beautiful woman waits around every corner, a cigarette dangling provocatively out the corner of her mouth.

But it seems to me there’s also a political dynamic at play here. American filmgoers, for instance, are drawn to cowboy flicks in times of international crisis. (This happened during the Cold War, and again a couple years ago, as the Iraq War was intensifying. See 3:10 to Yuma, and the Assassination of Jesse James for further evidence.) When all the news is of doom and gloom and internecine warfare, we long for a modicum of unambiguous moral drama: a bad man and a noble man, and the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

Good noir is quite a bit more tangled than that, of course—the genre’s heroes tend to carouse and fight and dabble in extracurricular vice. But pulp writers never let the vice obscure a pure heart; we know in the end that the detective will solve the case, rescue the dame, and later contentedly smoke a cigar in a darkened office.

After all, what is a detective but a figure of allegory—a hero who can make sense of our topsy-turvy world, by reason and the occasional show of muscle? What is a detective but a deft negotiator—a George J. Mitchell in a rumpled fedora? We look eastward with dread: the tumult in Pakistan, the mess in Gaza, the explosions in Afghanistan. Then we pick up a noir novel, where a strong and savvy operator has all the clues in hand, and the end is always in sight.

A month ago, when Abdel Al-Arkan looked out of his living room window, he saw groves of olive and orange trees stretching toward the Israeli border, their branches sagging with fruit.

Al-Arkan’s window is gone now, shattered by an Israeli air strike. The trees are gone, too, torn up by tank treads, replaced by fields of reddish dirt. When he peers through the shards, Al-Arkan, 31, sees the post-apocalyptic wreckage of his neighbors’ homes, reduced to tangled heaps of concrete and re-bar.

And he realizes that his neighbors lost even more than he did. They lost everything.

More here.

Mohammad Awad was so happy when the lights came back on that he didn’t want to go bed.

A trickle of electricity started flowing into Gaza City four days ago after Israel announced a unilateral cease-fire. Gazans such as Mr. Awad, 23, an engineering student, are relishing the whir of refrigerators and the distraction of television—conveniences they had to live without during three weeks of Israeli bombardment.

But the rejoicing is tempered by recognition that the task of rebuilding is daunting and complicated by the refusal of many nations, including the United States, to deal directly with the territory’s battered ruler, Hamas.

More here.

Facebook status updates are usually used to inform one’s friends of one’s emotional state or geographic location, to share an interesting tidbit, a piece of news, or a political perspective. In the past month nearly 700,000 Facebook users “donated” their status to an application called Support Gaza, which uses the updates as a means of disseminating the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza. A similar application called QassamCount tracks the number of Qassam rockets fired into Israel. The collection of updates below chronicles the events of the past three weeks from four different perspectives, a very personal and rough draft of History. The identifies of these four individuals have been anonymized. “A” is a activist in Madison, “B” is an academic in Beer Sheva, “C” is a student in San Francisco, “D” is a lawyer in Jerusalem.

1. Neale Donald Walsch got caught ripping off Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul, which has got to be a special kind of embarrassing. Walsch pleads ignorance, saying that he’s “truly mystified and taken aback” and “chagrined and astonished that [his] mind could play such a trick on [him].” Sound implausible? Read Erik Campbell’s “The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality,” from our Spring 2007 issue. It’s a very funny article that makes clear how such things happen. (Via Brevity)

2. Iraq War veteran Joshua Casteel explains how he became a conscious objector. He wrote about this in “Combat Multipliers,” in our Fall 2008 issue.

3. Macmillen helpfully illustrates how a book goes from idea to published work. I was not aware that the great majority of a publicity budget goes to World of Warcraft. TMYK. ☆ (Via Boing Boing)

4. Unlikely video of poetry being read by their authors. Particularly recommended: Poe, Thomas, Eliot, Whitman, and Frost. Creepy.

Ahmed Abu Arida, 41, was standing on the roof of his apartment building at 11:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, watching Israeli jets pound the city around him.

“The explosions were very loud,” Mr. Arida said, “but they seemed far away.”

Then he heard screaming from the rooms below.

“Ahmed, Ahmed, Ahmed, I am here,” he said, remembering the words of Iman Arida, 32, the mother of his seven children. “Those are the last words she ever spoke,” he said.

A piece of shrapnel from an Israeli rocket pierced Mrs. Arida’s brain as she lay sleeping with her 3-year-old son.

“She died in the last half-hour of the year,” Mr. Arida said.

More here.

Rumors turned out to be true: Egypt defied Israel today and allowed more than fifty foreign journalists into Gaza through the Rafah gate. I was one of them.

A handful of bold and extremely well organized reporters had made it in earlier using letters of “no objection” from their respective embassies. The American Embassy flatly refused to write any such letter, citing legal issues, and apparently worried about bucking the Israeli Government Press Office, which has managed to keep the Erez gate closed to all but a few sterilized press junkets.

The State Department finally met reporters halfway by allowing us to write our own affidavits, stating that we expect no help from Consular Affairs while inside Gaza, which the Consul then signed and notarized.

The American Embassy didn’t quite meet us halfway–the process had to be handled in person, and I had to make the ten hour trip from Rafah to Cairo and back to get it done. All of the other embassies sent faxes. The good news is that the affidavits got us across the border without any problem.

Why did it take three weeks for the Egyptian government to decide to let us in? My theory is that last Sunday’s bombing on the border, which injured four Egyptians, pushed Mubarak into a precarious position. He has been forced to act, I think, by recent events that show the Arab world that Israel thinks it can walk all over him. Hence the ambulances this week–and maybe the journalists too.

Whatever the reason, we’re in. And we’ll have more soon from here inside Gaza.