1. The book review is dead. At the very least, it’s very obviously dying. Anyway, we can all agree that it should be killed off, because it’s gotten to be irrelevant. If not downright parasitic. (Though maybe it might be salvaged if the average review was a little meaner.)

When the book was in its third consecutive week as No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, John Irving, who found himself stuck at No. 2, quipped that, if that was what it took to get to the top spot, he was content to be runner-up.

NW by Zadie Smith Penguin, 401 pp., $26.95 Our pre-eminence: we live in the age of comparison. -Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted inNW How to present, in language, the shimmering, ever-shifting life of a place?

On the last day of June of this year, a tech website called Redmond Pie posted two articles in quick succession that, on their face, had nothing to do with each other.