In the summer of 2005 there was such quiet on the northern front that Neapolitans assumed Di Lauro was back in charge. This was good news rather than bad. People did not know about his loss of power, and they could not have imagined that such a man would ever have surrendered. A few months later, on September 16, 2005, he was found by the police in the simple apartment of a humble old woman who had been sheltering and feeding him for a fee. He did not resist the police or make any comment when they walked in. He seemed to have been expecting the event. When he was taken outside, he kept his head down to foil the photographers. He did not strut. He did not cower. At the station, when asked, he said no more than he had said before. “I am Paolo Di Lauro, and I am a shopkeeper.” He then fell silent, as he has been ever since.

“The Camorra Never Sleeps”
by William Langewiesche, in Vanity Fair

Also quite interesting, the excellent (if uneven) Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano (made into an equally unsettling, bloody quasi-documentary of the same name).

Taken together, the badgeholders serve as voluntary traffic wardens for what truly makes Huffington Post so valuable to a company like AOL: Not brand. Not content. But access to the HuffPost network.

(Six degrees of aggregation: How the Huffington Post ate the Internet)

The simply-named Lord of the Rings Project attempts a family tree of every character mentioned by J.R.R. Tolkien.

(via Coudal Partners Blended Feed, if you know what I mean. Oh. You don’t? Er, here: coudal.com)

Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

A collection of interesting statements, lists, observations, manifesti. OccupyWriters.com. Ursula K. LeGuin, George Lakoff, Barbara Kingsolver, and many (some) more.

The “thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell” is actually pretty unfair to Gladwell who is an essayist rather than someone with pretensions to being a major academic. Even thinking people can appreciate the occasional apercu by Gladwell, however annoying he can sometimes be.

Prompted by a passing thought about TextMate, I thought I’d make a comprehensive, accurate, unbiased, and irrefutable survey of text editors by way of comparison to locations in The Lord of the Rings.

(via Crooked Timber)

(via Lifehacker)