Morning roundup …

… Hmm: Scientists find secret to writing a best-selling novel — Telegraph.

Count your verbs. And avoid clichés (tell that to Dan Brown).

… Speaking of verbs: THE GUNSLINGING WIT OF RAYLAN GIVENS.

As is customary, Raylan gets off the best lines in the season’s first episode. On a visit to a brothel now owned by his scummy, hapless foil, Dewey Crowe, he presses him for information: “If I start arresting girls, how’s that for business? You and Wade the only two pussies in this whorehouse.” (The dropped verb “are” in the second sentence is what sells it.) 

… Listen in: Katherine Powers and the lost art of American Catholicism.

… Question of the day: Since When Is Philip Roth an Idol?

… Hacking away: MAKING IT.

The plentiful recent books that preach hacking as a way of life—“Reality Hacking,” “Hacking Your Education,” “Hacking Happiness”—express devotion at least to the rhetoric of revolt. “Hacking Work,” a business book published in 2010, announces that “you were born to hack” and suggests ways in which one could “hack” work to achieve “morebetterfaster results.” As in most of these books, our hackers aren’t smashing the system; they’re fiddling with it so that they can get more work done. In this vision, it’s up to individuals to accommodate themselves to the system rather than to try to reform it. The shrinking of political imagination that accompanies such attempts at doing more with less usually goes unremarked.

(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)