According to Seaworld.com (I know, I know), “The echolocation ability of pilot whales is equal to that of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Vocalizations or short-finned pilot whales are in a higher frequency and wider frequency range than those of long-finned pilot whales. They also exhibit group-specific calls.” Fuck you, long-finned pilot whales! Short-finned pilot whales forever.

• “A man who is somehow both totally inadequate and totally heroic.” Josephine Livingstone points us toward a new taxonomy of the detective in crime fiction. (Prospect Magazine Blog)
• How long until we’re just pairing AR headset display text with the tactile pleasures of an actual book? Two years at the outside, if it hasn’t already been developed. (Bruce Sterling)
• Adam Robinson of kickass indie publisher Publishing Genius is running a Kickstarter to fund his next season. It’s worth your time and your buck.
• Video game designer Kent Hudson has a new game coming out soon: The Novelist, in which the player plays the role of a ghost who inhabits the home of Dan, a writer. Without making your presence known, you can affect the events in Dan’s house to guide him to either work on his novel or spend more time with his wife and son. It’s billed as “a quiet game,” so the odds of it devolving into a The Shining-style nightmare are low. (Kotaku)
• “I’m not kidding about this: to avoid classroom giggling (or worse), my high school English teacher referred to Melville’s book as ‘Moby Richard.'” Ann Beattie has grown to love footnotes. (Paris Review Daily)
• Only one “first family” of newspapers is still in the game, according to this timeline dating back to 1850. (New York)
• Salman Rushdie talks about his years in hiding, Thomas Pynchon‘s appearance, and an advertising campaign he put together for Aerobars. “I invented it because the guy I was working with had a stammer. We were sitting in a room trying to think of an idea and said, ‘It’s fucking impossibubble.’ It was my one genuine lightbulb moment.” (The Guardian)
• Idiocy strikes a decisive blow against common sense: Google now lists a definition for the word literally that includes the phrase “not literally.” (GalleyCat)

A song for Tuesday: The Seeds – “Fallin’ Off The Edge Of My Mind”