Only the Blue Whale is bigger than the Fin Whale and the Blue Whale is HUGE. (Image: Wikimedia)

• The British human rights group Reprieve is accusing U.S. authorities of preventing a copy of Alexander Solzhenistsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago from being delivered to Shaker Aamer, an inmate at Guantanamo Bay. (Reprieve)
• Meet the publisher—may he be lonely his entire life—who cancelled a book rather than indicating that its author is gay on the book jacket. (Via N.K. Jemisin)
• William Vollmann, author of An Afghanistan Picture Show was on NPR this morning, discussing his recent Harper’s article about the FBI suspecting of him of being the Unabomber and the anthrax mailer. (NPR)
• There’s a musical about the NBA lockout, the darkest period of my life. (Slate)
• Bob Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, responds to recent criticism of the magazine’s awful VIDA numbers (its last issue featured only one woman) with an “odd,” “condescending” letter marked by “a tone of total disinterest.” (The Village Voice)
• Here’s every first sentence Elmore Leonard ever wrote. (The Stacks)

A song for Thursday: “Reach for the Dead” by Boards of Canada