TELL ME WHY?
"Why exactly are the Beatles cool again," asks Sarah Lyall, "so cool that they've outsold the other big sellers of the moment here [in London], in a famously fickle industry where even last week's band can be considered embarrassingly passé?" In the New York Review of Books Geoffrey O'Brien recalls the impact that the Liverpudlian band had on post-Kennedy-assassination America. "It was all moving too fast even for the so-called professionals. The Beatles were such a fresh product that those looking for ways to exploit it—from Ed Sullivan to the aging news photographers and press agents who seemed holdovers from the Walter Winchell era—stood revealed as anachronisms as they flanked a group who moved and thought too fast for them." To read Slate's "Book Club" on the Beatles, click here.

FOLDING NEWS
Yesterday, the owners of George, Hachette Filipacchi, a subsidiary of a vast European munitions and media company named Groupe Lagadère, announced they would cease publication of the political monthly founded by John F. Kennedy Jr. Sad news for many, including myself, as I worked at George for a number of years. The announcement was broken by Inside.com—click here to read their report. For a Howard Kurtz article on the subject, click here; for Alex Kuczyniski's, click here.

BOISTROUS SPIRIT
Alan Brinkley, the Columbia history professor, writes about the second volume of David Levering Lewis's biography of W.E.B. Du Bois in the New Republic. In Brinkley's opinion, "Had Du Bois done nothing besides publish his remarkable works of history, sociology, and moral commentary, he would still be a titanic figure in our national memory; but he did a great deal more than that. Many of his greatest published works were, in fact, a product of his temporary frustrations with, and departures from, the world that almost always most attracted him: the world of politics and organization and action."

WEB ART The film director Tim Burton is also the author of The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. Keen to see some of the characters from the book appear on the Web and in animated form, he turned to Flinch Studio for help. According to Animation World Magazine, "it was a natural fit. Burton came to the studio with watercolor designs of his characters, and [Will] Amato remembers: 'He was really concerned with it not looking like your standard Web cartoon. He emphatically did not want that. He really liked the idea of it being, as Tim put it, 'No big deal.' Meaning—a few artists could do it, on a few computers; … there would be no budgetary committees, no big overhead producer. It would be almost like we were staying up all night making a funny comic book together. He liked that do-it-yourself scale.' " To view the result, called "Stainboy," click here (you'll need a Flash Plug-In).

UNHAPPY READING As Lynn Barber points out, rarely has a book been so cruelly mistitled as Gerald Clarke's biography of Judy Garland, Get Happy. Nor is reading Clarke's book much of a mood lifter. As Barber writes: "[Garland] married her fifth and last husband, Mickey Deans, in London in 1969; a columnist described their empty wedding reception at Quaglino's as 'the saddest and most pathetic party I have ever attended.' A few months later she was dead of barbiturate poisoning, aged 47. Her story is tragic but exhausting …"

LEVANTINE CONSTRUCTION Now that Beirut has ceased to be a war zone, Lebanese officials are considering how the city should be rebuilt. As Victor A. Khoueiry explains in Architecture Week, there's little consensus among the planners: "Should Beirut replace its old fabric with a new one? Should it conserve some old elements? And if so, which ones? Should rebuilding be true to the original, or would such 'non-transformation' of buildings risk a transformation of social relationships?" To prevent unruly real estate companies from destroying what remains of the ravaged city, politicians created the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District, which is based, as Khoueiry writes, on a law that regulates [such] companies … in accordance with an officially approved master plan."

CLOSING LETTERS
In a letter to his readers, Paul Tough explains why he's closing Open Letters.com. "None of us who work on Open Letters entered into the project hoping to get rich. We did, however, have some hopes of not getting too poor. Some of those hopes were based on the pie-in-the-sky Internet economics of the spring of 2000, in which it seemed that money would follow good content—or lousy content, for that matter—wherever it wanted to go. Some of them were based on Tibor Kalman's belief that there are 'a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future.' And, really, it just seemed like a worthwhile and exciting thing to do, even if its destiny was to be short-lived." At the time of writing, Tough's disclosure had not yet reached the offices of fuckedcompany.com, the self-described "dot.com dead pool."

OPEN AUTHORS—DEAD OR ALIVE If many Internet sites are failing, others appear to be thriving, for example, sites belonging to writers and journalists. Malcolm Gladwell and Rebecca Mead, two New Yorker journalists, now post their articles on their respective Web sites. To visit the site of Robert Wright (Slate's "Earthling" correspondent), click here. The Web site of Oliver Sacks, the doctor and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and other books about neurological conditions, is an impressive assembly of biographical detail, select writings, and lots of links to neurology sites. Fans of two dead authors, Anthony Powell and Patrick O'Brien, can click here and here.

OF BLOCKBUSTERS AND BLOCKHEADS
The New York Times editorial writers weigh in on the Hillary Clinton book deal. Generally, they chastise the first lady for accepting an advance rather than royalties, i.e., money up front rather than a share of future book sales. The editorial writers are concerned that such a large payment—$8 million—will compromise Clinton, though it's unclear why they believe this should be so. Do they think that Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, the company that owns publisher Simon & Schuster, will edit the Clinton memoir himself? I don't think so. Do they believe the Clinton advance is a favor? That in return for a down payment, Clinton will treat Viacom favorably in Senate hearings on copyright and communication law? Hmmm … that would be smart, though surely we can (and should) depend on the Times' indefatigable congressional correspondents to inform us if this happened. The serious point, which the Times ignores, is why Hillary Clinton has chosen to write a memoir at all. Surely, the new senator from New York should be known as the author of legislation rather than the "author" of a book we all know will be written by well-paid ghosts—hence the need for a hefty advance. For Inside.com's report on the auction of the book, click here.

FEAR AND LOATHING
Raymond Chandler was one of the best crime writers of the 20^th century—some would say the best. To visit a well-informed Chandler appreciation site, click here. He was also a writer of bilious letters, as Will Cohu explains. "Describing himself as 'by tradition and long study a complete snob,' Chandler was not, by his own admission, much good at telling a raw story, and when it came to writers who were, his instinct was to lash out. 'Everything he touches smells like a billygoat,' he wrote of James M Cain. 'He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls.' He was similarly acerbic about Hemingway: 'I suppose the man's epitaph, if he had the choosing of it, would be: Here Lies a Man Who Was Bloody Good In Bed: Too Bad He's Alone Here.' "