stalwart alert • Westport CT Schools Superintendent Elliott Landon has rejected a request to remove The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold from the Coleytown Middle School library. maybe it’s me, but i find new england to more rational about stuff like this . . . for the most part.

immortality • A British publishing house is reissuing Blowing Up Russia by poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko – the first of a slew of planned editions that will carry the dead man’s anti-Kremlin allegations around the world.