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• Los Alamos Clears Fraud Suspect (Noah Schachtman, Wired News)

"Los Alamos National Laboratory equipment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But she dialed a number that had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts shop, and wound up buying a Mustang with government money instead."

• John Steinbeck – Should He Be Afraid Of Oprah? (Chris Suellentrop, Slate Magazine)

"Steinbeck's selection by Oprah is likely to confirm the suspicions of those critics who look down their noses at him as a simplistic writer not worthy of inclusion in the American pantheon. For starters, if East of Eden is a classic, it's a disputed one. A handful of Steinbeck partisans defend it as one of Steinbeck's great books, to be placed alongside works like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Others argue that it's flawed but still worthwhile, even a masterpiece. But an equally large—if not larger—group thinks that hardly anything good can be said about it. Even Steinbeck's hagiographer, Jackson Benson, didn't like it. Here's one recent critic's assessment reduced to a book-jacket blurb: "ponderous, clanging biblical allegory ... indefensible ... so laughable that it's impervious to parody." The New York Times once called East of Eden "arguably his most problematic work," and the New York Review of Books has referred to it as "bloated, pretentious, and uncertain … a wretched and meretricious book.""

• Altered Carbon (Tom Perrine, Slashdot)

"The main technological trapping of this setting is the ability to digitize, store and transport human consciousness. Peoples' consciousnesses can, and are, digitized and loaded out of and into their bodies on a regular basis. The state uses this to punish criminals by storing their minds "in the stack" (digital prison) and the wealthy and powerful can have themselves "backed up" like yesterday's spreadsheets. Interstellar travel is via "digitized human freight." Human bodies ("sleeves") can be rented, bought and sold, to provide containers for these digitized minds. And this is just the background."

• Sidekicks, Mutants and Goddesses (Annalee Newitz, San Francisco Bay Guardian)

"Ever since a conservative doctor named Fredric Wertham started making noises in the 1940s about the homosexual subtexts in many comic books, comic book geeks have known – or feared – that there was something just a little queer about their textual preferences. It's hard to deny the sexual implications in books that follow the adventures of nerds with secret identities and social outcasts with superpowers. It wasn't until the 1970s that you began to see underground comic books with openly gay characters, and Northstar didn't punch his way out of the closet in Alpha Flight until the early 1990s. But the plots of perennial favorites like Batman nevertheless had what Xena: Warrior Princess devotees like to call "the subtext." Indeed, the queer subtexts of comics are what make these fantasies of heroism compelling. What we read as "queer" in the lives of superheroes are all those things that make them vulnerable, different, and ultimately human."

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.