When the Bank of England announced last month its intention to portray Jane Austen on its ten-pound note, it seemed the most uncontroversial of choices. Who better than Austen to stand as a representative of female accomplishment? Many of the female historical figures that might have been chosen were shocking in their time: consider Mary Wollstonecraft and Florence Nightingale. And most still have an air of scandal about them, their subsequent canonization notwithstanding. Among literary figures, the Bank of England did not chose to honor Charlotte Brontë, whose unparalleled heroine, Jane Eyre, declares herself “a free human being with an independent will.” Nor did they choose George Eliot, the author of the single greatest English novel, “Middlemarch,” whose adoption of a masculine pseudonym may, for her contemporaries, have gone some way toward mitigating the unsettling fact of her towering intellectual superiority over most, if not all, of her male peers.

Jane Austen, on the other hand, has been almost entirely domesticated through her popularity. The author of six immortal novels, she is also the unwitting begetter of countless derivative movies, critiques, and dating guides, the inspiration behind Bridget Jones, and, most recently, an infelicitous sculptural misrepresentation of Mr. Darcy. This popular, neutered appeal must have been what recommended her to the powers at the Bank. The subversiveness inherent in Austen’s accomplishment—a woman making great, lasting art by describing little, fleeting lives—has been overshadowed by the pleasures she offers. Austen today has a status among the English rather like that of a cup of tea: cozy, restorative, unthreatening, and omnipresent.

From: Sherman Alexie
To: Jess Walter
Sent: Thursday, June 20
Subject: Twentieth Anniversary “Lone Ranger and Tonto”

S.A.: So I’ve been trying to write the intro to the twentieth-anniversary edition, but it feels too self-congratulatory, so do you want to have an e-mail exchange about it and use that as the intro?

J.W.: “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is twenty!?! Your e-mail sent me scurrying to my signed copy. I looked at the jacket photo and there you are, with the greatest “Breakfast Club” pro-wrestling warrior mullet of all time.

Two of America’s most venerable newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, have been sold in the past week: the Globe to John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, for seventy million dollars; and the Post to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. (Read David Remnick on the sale of the Post.) Daily newspapers have been part of the American landscape since the Pennsylvania Packet; for much of the nation’s history, they were the sole source of news. But they’ve been fairly minor figures in the history of rock and roll. For starters, rock and roll has depended upon (and concerned itself with) expansion in media and technology: the increased popularity of portable AM radios in the nineteen-sixties, the birth of MTV in the eighties, and so on. And rock’s preoccupation with style has meant that when bands do write about print journalism, they lean more toward magazines than newspapers. Still, there are dozens of songs about newspapers. Here are ten.

Skyler was grouchy. The car wash smelled funny, like the chemicals they use to wash cars. Suddenly, Saul drove up and said something about a sandwich. Skyler just sort of stared at him, her soul being all dead and rotten from living with the terrible secret of Walt being a meth kingpin. She had a lot to think about, between the car wash and the kids and the dead rottenness of her soul, not that that was her fault. “Sandwich,” Saul said, snapping his fingers. “Sandwich.” And Skyler went to the place where the sandwiches were and got him one.

“Damn, Skinny Pete,” Badger said. “I never knew you had such a boss collection of lanyards!”

“You know it, bro,” Skinny Pete said proudly. “I learned how to make lanyards at Camp Watonka when I was eleven, and I was the lanyard king, yo.”

The modern cinema starts with a movie about journalism—in particular, with the story of one reporter’s attempt to come up with a better obituary of the newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane. There’s something inherently cinematic about an investigation, which comes with its built-in disjunction between story and plot—between the facts being tracked down and the process of tracking them down—which is why movies about journalists abound in times of overt aesthetic modernity.

The greatest of American political movies, John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” from 1962, is also set in motion by a newspaperman’s inquiries; almost the entire film is the dramatization of what a senator (James Stewart) tells the inquiring reporter about earlier days in the small Western town of Shinbone and about the obscure farmer whose funeral the senator and his wife are there to attend. It also features one of the most romantic movie journalists—the poetic, alcoholic, and intrepid Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), the one-man team behind the Shinbone Star (“Founder, owner, editor, and I also sweep out the place”), whose daring reports on local misdeeds cost him his life—and the most famous line ever uttered in a movie on the subject of journalism: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The first time I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I carried a notebook and a sense of dread. The mood was as solemn as I expected, but the place was crowded and not very peaceful. Visitors were silently urged to go with the flow, move in step with others and not linger too long.

The displays were impressively well kept—maybe too well kept. There were life-size dioramas of the victims trudging barefoot through ashen sludge, shredded and bloodied; massive models of the city as it was, pinpointing the exact location of ground zero; bent and crushed watches and clocks frozen to the moment—8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945. The feeling that all the carefully curated and eye-catching exhibits sometimes felt like part of a Hiroshima theme park was probably unavoidable.

The Washington Post announced yesterday that it is being sold to Jeff Bezos Amazon founder for two hundred and fifty million dollars. (David Remnick on why the owner Donald Graham sold the paper to Bezos; a Post reading list from the New Yorker archive.)

For NPR, Lynn Neary reports on how e-books are straining relations between publishing houses and libraries.

Molly Crabapple’s sketchbook from the trial of Bradley Manning.

At Salon, Michele Filgate wonders if social media is replacing the role of writers’ journals and letters, and what readers might lose in that transition.

A Tumblr devoted to tracking the many literary references on Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black.”

My favorite (though perhaps apocryphal) story of an artist’s inability to let go is about Pierre Bonnard, who, in old age, is said to have visited museums with paints and brushes hidden in his coat in order to add some touches to his works on display. The cinema, built as it is of cuts, is a natural medium for self-critical or penitent artists; Stanley Kubrick famously had scenes cut from prints of “2001” and “The Shining” after the movies were already in theatrical release, and there is the remarkable subgenre of directors’ cuts that are shorter than the released version (certainly Charles Burnett’s “My Brother’s Wedding,” and Elaine May showed a slightly shortened version of “Ishtar” at the 92nd Street Y two years ago). In the mid-nineties, André Téchiné told me that he was considering making trims to his film “My Favorite Season” for its American release (the distributor later said that Téchiné went into the editing room to rework the film but then decided to leave it as-is, a wise decision regarding a fine movie). And, of course, directors often rework the same material, as Alfred Hitchcock did with his remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” as Howard Hawks did with “Ball of Fire” (improving it as “A Song Is Born”) and with “Rio Bravo” (as “El Dorado”).

At a party in 1971, a young woman turned to The New Yorker’s George W. S. Trow and said, “Did you know that everything demonic is commercial?” The party was thrown by Warner Bros. Records, for the British rock quartet Black Sabbath, at the time a “fledgling” band. Four decades later, thanks to Sabbath and Stephen King and Charles Addams and Stephenie Meyer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freddy Kreuger and countless other pop-culture manifestations of the demonic, the question, originally asked in earnest, has become rhetorical—not to say redundant. The undead are everywhere. The occult is a cash machine. New Yorker cartoons are not the only place you’ll find the Grim Reaper these days. He’s also the star of a recent animated children’s series, “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.”

Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which tells the story of a Native American boy who transfers to an all-white school, has been pulled from the sixth-grade summer reading list of a Queens school for its mention of masturbation.

Dan Kois sets out to read twenty-three mass-market paperbacks in one week at the beach.

“Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece.” Tom Hanks explains his obsession with vintage typewriters.

Caleb Crain speaks with the Daily Beast about blogging, writing for academic versus trade presses, and his début novel, “Necessary Errors.” (Other August books to watch out for.)

In an excerpt from his new book, “Thinking in Numbers,” Daniel Tammet considers the influence of the then novel mathematical concept of zero on Shakespeare’s work.

A history of Farrar, Straus & Giroux in book covers. (Read Robert Gottlieb’s review of Boris Kachka’s “Hothouse.”)