Tonight, in the main branch of the New York Public Library, the long-running conversation about artist copyright, piracy in the digital age, changing (and disappearing) artist revenue streams, and illegal downloading continues with two people who’ve added much to that discourse of late: Talking Heads vocalist and all-around interesting fella David Byrne, who recently penned How Music Works — a wide-ranging treatise on how music is crafted, distributed, monetized, listened to, and regarded — and Chris Ruen, the 31-year-old author of the fascinating new book Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger For Free Content Starves Creativity, which, as you can tell by the title, argues that illegal downloading not only hurts the artist’s bottom line, but ultimately threatens to choke off the supply of great music that, for many of us, helps make life worth living.

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Vidal glows when he talks about politics — that much is evident in these four interviews about his favorite subject.

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A Newsnight editor has been shortlisted for a Bad Sex award by the Literary Review.

Paul Mason, who is the economics editor of the BBC programme, could win the prize for having written the worst sex scene in fiction over the past year, according to the Evening Standard.

The 52-year-old from Leigh in Lancashire is nominated for a passage in his debut book Rare Earth, which features an overweight businessman struggling to manoeuvre himself into a tantric position…

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Gore Vidal died in July at the age of 86 and these four previously unavailable interviews, spanning 20 years, show him talking in his usual provocative, stimulating, humorous and sometimes petty fashion.

Witty quips are scattered throughout I Told You So. Quizzed on whether it was true that actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon asked him to be godfather of their new baby, Vidal says: “Always a godfather, never a god.”

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GORE VIDAL IS OFTEN TOUTED, particularly for this slight collection of four interviews, as the best conversationalist since Oscar Wilde. Let’s begin by explicating terms, or at least with etymologies, like the word “conversation.” Starting with the Latin conversationem, and then looking at Old French, we get “having dealings with others” or “keeping company with.” The specific sense of “talking” dates from the 1570s. “Manner of conducting oneself in the world” is long since archaic, but conversation as a synonym for sexual intercourse dates from 1511. In these interviews, however, Vidal has little to say about sex. He does that elsewhere.

Since the early 1500s, “interview” has meant a face-to-face meeting, coming from the French entrevue, a verbal noun from s’entrevoir, “to see each other,” “visit each other briefly,” or the “expression and exchange of individual ideas through talking with other people.” The journalistic sense of an interview first appears in American English in 1869. So we’re not starting out with Anglo-Saxon words.

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WHERE HAS ALL THE EXCITEMENT gone for statehood in the West Bank? A year ago in September there were festivities and public displays of hope on the streets of Ramallah; one year later, little attention was paid to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s United Nations speech reiterating the need for an independent Palestinian state. Lackluster support for the PA should come as no surprise. In the past 12 months alone, the United States blocked the PA’s bid to declare statehood; Israel has intensified settlement growth while Israeli settlers have rampaged, destroying property and desecrating holy sites with impunity; the international community, focused on Iran and the threat of regional war, has stood idly by. An equitable two state solution between Israel and the Palestinians is all but dead.

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Some university presses are fighting off cuts, but the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism on Monday announced that it is launching a new academic press. Beginning in 2013, the press will release three to five books a year related to journalism. The press will be operated with OR Books, an independent publisher that focuses on e-books and print-on-demand.

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Readers of this brief book will lament the lack of wit and astute commentary which characterizes contemporary political debate. Gore Vidal, who died last July, was one of the last public intellectuals in American public life. Current viewers of our television wasteland may be shocked to learn that writers such as Vidal were once frequent guests on late-night TV like the Dick Cavett Show. Vidal represents an era when the intersection among politics, literature, art, history, and entertaining conversation mattered. With the advent of 24-hour cable news channels, the quantity of political chatter has increased, but reading Vidal reminds us of how much the quality of political discourse has deteriorated. It is not so much that one will always agree with Vidal’s conclusions, but that we are missing a witty and healthy irreverence for power which Vidal at his best represents.

I Told You So includes four interviews with Vidal conducted between 1988 and 2007 by Jon Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California-Irvine and a contributing editor to The Nation magazine. The interviews are printed in reverse chronological order with the first conversation in April 2007 before an audience of several thousand at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus followed by a more intimate dialogue in December 2006 before the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California. Vidal was also a political figure, which is quite evident in a radio interview he granted Wiener during the September 2000 Shadow Convention challenging the political assumptions of the Clinton administration and its heir apparent, Al Gore. Although appearing last in this collection, Wiener first interviewed Vidal for the Radical History Review at the writer’s Italian villa on July 12, 1988. Although sometimes repetitious, these conversations represent a critique of American empire and the threat of this monolith to the republic. This theme is not only evident in Vidal’s conversations but also forms an important thread in his essays, screenplays, histories, short stories, and twenty-three novels which include an overview of American history in the Narratives of Empire series with Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000). Wiener concludes, “Gore Vidal wrote as a citizen of the republic and a critic of the empire. We won’t have another like him” (117).

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Gore Vidal, who died in July, was one of our greatest novelists and essayists – and yet he never went to college. In a 2007 interview I asked him why not.

“I graduated from [Phillips] Exeter,” he explained, “and I was aimed at going to Harvard. Instead I enlisted in [the Navy] in 1943. When I got out, in ’46, I thought, ‘I’ve spent all my life in institutions that I loathe, including my service in the [Navy] of the United States.’ I thought, ‘Shall I go for another four years?’

“My first book was already being published” — it was the novel Williwaw, and it got good reviews. “I said ‘I’m going to be told how to write by somebody at Harvard.’ I said, ‘This is too great a risk.’ “

The audience of 2,000 at a book festival at the University of California at Los Angeles laughed and applauded.

“But I did go there to lecture,” he added. “This was about ’47 or ’48. There was a big audience, and many of them were my classmates from Exeter, who were overage juniors and seniors in what looked to be their mid-forties. I came out cheerily, as is my wont, and I’ve never felt such hatred radiating. They’d all predicted my total failure, because I was not to go to Harvard and meet a publisher or an agent — which is, I think, why they went.”

Read the full excerpt in Inside Higher Education

Jeremy Greenfield, in his piece for Forbes rebutting my Guardian article “Ten Ways to Save the Publishing Industry,” suggests that I base my arguments on “flawed assumptions” and that I am “condescending” towards the book industry. I appreciate Greenfield entering the fray but I don’t think the arguments I advanced are significantly undermined by his critique. I’m taking advantage here of his generous offer of space to respond to the points he raised.

(Editor’s note: The following piece will make more sense after reading Robinson’s original post at the Guardian and then Greenfield’s response at Forbes.)

Let me be clear about one thing right at the start: The difficulties the publishing industry faces, which, in my opinion, are of epic proportions, do not derive from a lack of intelligence or talent among those running it. They are structural problems, and all the more intractable for that.

Greenfield contests whether any problem exists at all. Citing AAP figures, he points out that book sales in the first five months of 2012 rose 7% overall, and 15% in the trade. Five months is not much time on which to proclaim a business in the ascendant. Trade sales revenue, after all, rose only 4.5% in the three years preceding 2010, barely ahead of inflation , and overall book sales declined in 2011.

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In December of 1962, Consolidated Edison, New York City’s main purveyor of electricity, announced that it had submitted an official proposal to the US Atomic Energy Commission (the AEC, the precursor to today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission) for the construction of a nuclear power plant on a site called Ravenswood. . . in Queens. . . on the East River. . . directly across from the United Nations. . . within five miles of roughly five million people.

Ravenswood became the site of America’s first demonstrations against nuclear power. It inspired petitions to President John F. Kennedy and NYC Mayor Robert Wagner, and the possibility of a nuclear reactor in such a densely populated area even invited public skepticism from the pro-nuclear head of the AEC, David Lilienthal. Finally, after a year of pressure, lead by the borough’s community leaders, Con Edison withdrew their application.

But within three years, reports suggested Con Ed had plans to build a nuclear plant under Central Park. After that idea was roundly criticized, the utility publicly proposed a reactor complex under Welfare Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), instead.

Despite the strong support of Laurence Rockefeller, the brother of New York State’s governor, the Welfare Island project disappeared from Con Ed’s plans by 1970. . . soon to be replaced by the idea of a nuclear “jetport”–artificial islands to be built in the ocean just south of New York City that would host a pair of commercial reactors.

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