Thursday’s the perfect day for a wrap-up—good ol’ Thunor’s Day, Donderdag, or as Truman Capote had Holly Golightly put it best in Breakfast at Tiffany’s:
“‘Thursday.’ She stood up. ‘My God,’ she said, and sat down again with a moan. ‘It’s too gruesome.'”
Gruesome or not, *it is* almost Friday. And with that in mind, we’d like to proliferate a few news items and multimedia ephemera in what we hope will become a Chicago ritual: the wrap-up on the day that is not the day that wraps things up. Onward!

With Veterans Day still weighing on hearts and minds, David Royko has reposted his father Mike Royko’s classic Veterans Day column from 1993. Many know the legend of Mike Royko, Newspaperman, but few are familiar with the tender naiveté Royko exhibited in his Air Force days, via the exchange of letters with his sweetheart (and later wife) Carol Duckman that became Royko in Love: Mike’s Letters to Carol.
In unavoidably idiosyncratic news outside of scholarly publishing that we just can’t help touching upon: the Guardian and now People and the Los Angeles Times report the heroic, years-old tale of porpoises rescuing a sleeping, surfboard-helming Dick Van Dyke somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. If only scholarship circulated like chimney sweeps, folks!

The Scholarly Kitchen continues to run with a great series of posts about the paradigms binding contemporary publishing—this week alone, they’ve touched upon paywalls, the concept of trust throughout the various stages of publishing, and the peer review process and its levels of transparency.
The shadow of Milton Friedman continues to loom large at the New York Times, with Capitalism and Freedom shortly away from year fifty.
Have we mentioned that we love Columbia University Press’s thoughtful weekly curation of scholarly press blogs? Thanks, guys!
Fare thee well, print edition of U.S. News and World Report?
Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman’s Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It and Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations both made the Huffington Post’s list of Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010. Congrats to all!

And finally, Press author Daiva Markelis sits down with Chicago’s own Milt Rosenberg for an Extension 720 Podcast Exclusive about her recent book White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life. Listen in and be sure to read an excerpt of the book here.