Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis made the call yesterday to speculate and crowdsource about the Boston bombings—"'Shut up and let the cops do their job’ in the case of a terrorist attack is EXACTLY wrong"—but he needn't worry, Reddit is all over it. They have a spreadsheet even! So let's find out how the nice folks at /findbostonbombers are doing.

• "I hate to even bring up this point, but when I have seen videos of radical Islamists yelling 'allahu akbar' in the past, I seem to recall seeing them make something like the pinched thumb and forefingers gesture he is making in the second picture."

• "also could it [...]

After pulling Neal Stephenson's ebook of Reamde off Amazon on Tuesday, early this morning, Amazon emailed to tell readers they could replace their copy. "The version you received had Missing Content that have been corrected," they wrote. (Or, apparently, their machines wrote. So glad the "Missing Content" "have been corrected.") And here's how it works: "If you wish to receive the updated version, please reply to this email with the word 'Yes' in the first line of your response. Within 2 hours of receiving the e-mail any device that has the title currently downloaded will be updated automatically if the wireless is on." It's a strange kind of [...]

This is relevant not just for the highly-entertaining string of profanities being released on Twitter but because his office discovered he was trapped in the elevator because of said Twitter account.

Not only is London overspending for this coming summer's Olympics—the Guardian now estimates that the initial budget of £2.37 billion may be ten times that—but also the city will be turned into a locked-down police state! Sort of permanently, in fact. Neat! During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city [...]

It's a generally accepted rule that you shouldn't take too seriously anything an author says while promoting his book on the radio. Or at least I thought it was a generally accepted rule. Certainly, Christopher Buckley tells a great anecdote about the time he was asked by a radio host whether, per the author bio on his novel Little Green Men, he really had acted as policy advisor to William Howard Taft. Not only did Buckley happily confirm that he had advised President Taft, but he spent the remainder of the interview discussing the specific advice he'd imparted to the (very) late statesman. Of course Buckley said something ridiculous [...]

Are there organizations we love more than local bookstore McNally Jackson? Maybe NARAL, or the SLA. So when we question the introduction of a Espresso Book Machine there, we do it with love. The EBM, the brainchild of Jason Epstein (AKA Mr. Judith Miller, among many other achievements), carries, in its current incarnation, about 3 million titles—trade books and out-of-copyright books. That's not bad! The New York City Public Library systems has more than 20 million books, but, you know, with them, you don't get to keep the books forever. Google Books, a main supplier to the EBM, has about 15 million titles; those are not all [...]