Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business...

At this point in Garry Trudeau’s career, John Goodman has just proved to be more irresistible a roommate than Zonker.

Hello, daily call sheet; goodbye for now, daily comics page.

Trudeau, whose TV show “Alpha House” recently ended its debut season with strong viewership, got the good news: Amazon Studios has picked up his politically satiric program for a second season, the cartoonist and his syndicate are set to announce later this afternoon. That’s right: Fans will get to see more of Goodman and the gang portray four Republican senators who banter and bicker as Hill roomies.

But providing punch lines for Trudeau’s newest characters comes at a cost: As of Feb. 24, the daily “Doonesbury” — Trudeau’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip — will be put on long-term and open-ended hiatus, distributor Universal Uclick will announce...

It is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history: the instant when Charlie Chaplin, playing a sadsack hobo, becomes The Tramp. Walking down a country road, heartbroken, Chaplin picks up his legs and spirits, waddling into the future. Chaplin actually debuted the comic hobo one hundred years ago in 1914, as WNYC noted. But it's in the 1915 movie The Tramp that he completed his transformation. Within the year, he was nationally famous. Working on a project for the Oakland Museum of California, I found out that Chaplin had filmed this moment not in Los Angeles, but outside the still-tiny town of Niles, California...

On Friday, the University of Colorado–Boulder released a scathing report from an independent investigating team about sexual misconduct in one of its top humanities programs, the department of philosophy. The report, commissioned, it seems, under the misguided assumption that its findings would remain private, details a female-unfriendly environment of sexual harassment that could be fodder for a sequel to The Wolf of Wall Street, if only philosophers made any money...

At an after-hours hacking event at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Aaron Ginn approached an engineer whose face was buried in a laptop.

Like more than a few techies, Mr. Ginn could pass for a skateboarder or a member of a boy band: As he circulated, he wore a red Reebok cap, its bill tilted high over his short dark hair, a silver and black cross around his neck and a green T-shirt printed with “Lincoln Labs.” That’s the name of the talent-scouting group he founded last year with two friends. But unlike others in this game, Mr. Ginn was in search of a rare technology-industry breed: Republicans...

In the 1860s, the Circassian people were driven out of Sochi by the Tzar's armies to settle in Syria Israel and Jordan. Now, displaced again by Assad's war, they want the world to recognize them -- and to return home...

Mr. Leaver is crawling the length of Manhattan. You can read about it here.

Crawling away from Columbus Circle on another cold morning.  Sunshine and Larry with new electric green bootlaces. Better for me to spot him. This is my tenth crawl. My son is about to turn ten. Today I will crawl ten blocks. I am half way home, give or take a few blocks. I am deep into this relationship now.  I suppose I am roughly half way through with my life too, give or take a few years and barring anything unexpected…

Whether as novelist, essayist, painter, filmmaker, recording artist, mystic, expatriate, psychological patient, Scientologist, Beat progenitor, plagiarist, punk music godfather, anti-censorship activist, queer hero, science-fiction guru, junkie, media theorist, advertising model -- or accidental murderer -- the figure of Burroughs (1914-1997) casts as many shadows as the limits of each of these labels...

This evening, Bill Nye the Science Guy will debate creationist leader Ken Ham at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Tickets to the event sold out in just two minutes, according to the museum (though you will be able to stream the debate live here). So how will Nye fare in this lion's den? The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but debating it successfully against a creationist armed with "facts" of his own is another matter. It's about style as much as substance, and Nye, an entertainer, may fare better than an average scientist in this regard.

We don't know how Nye will argue his case. But if you want to clinch the argument for evolution with one compelling piece of evidence—and with one single image—you (and Nye) probably want to choose the one above. Here's why...

It's a story that almost defies belief: A man leaves Mexico in December 2012 for a day of shark fishing and ends up surviving 13 months on fish, birds and turtles before washing ashore on the remote Marshall Islands some 5,500 miles away...