A Few Odds and Ends

Our forays around the Internet today reminded us of several of our books, so here is a grab bag of links.

Bust has a short piece on a form of male birth control being developed in India. It's called RISUG—an acronym for "Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance." So far no American or European drug company has developed a male contraceptive. In her book The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making, Nelly Oudshoorn explains why. She says it ultimately comes down to how we define masculinity.

Buzz Feed has a list of 9 Suprising Things You Probably Didn't Know About Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burrough's Tarzan series is well-known, but did you know Burroughs has a crater named after him on Mars? A few years ago we were pleased to publish a collection of letters between Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston, a Nebraska businessman, called Brother Men. These letters between the famous author and a friend he had known since military school give a glimpse into Burrough's personal life, and insight into visual culture and media technologies, consumerism, the history of the family, the history of authorship and readership, and the development of the West.

The New Yorker considers the meaning of the U.S. Open without Tiger Woods. Lee Ellis notes that the last time the Open was held at Congressional Country Club was 1997. Tiger had just one his first major. Since then, there's been a dramatic change in the amount of money at stake in golf, which Ellis says is Tiger's legacy. In February, we'll be publishing anthropologist Orrin Starn's take on Tiger, The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal. Starn tackles the complex intersection between money, sex, and race in the Tiger scandal. In the end Starn thinks Tiger will make a comeback. "You can’t have good drama without failure, mistakes, and some surprising plot twists," he writes. "As banal as they might have been, Tiger's personal troubles had given an unexpected turn to his story, a whole new layer of speculation, doubt, and debate." We're wondering now whether Tiger will have returned to golf by the time Starn's book comes out next winter. Check back for more on this fascinating forthcoming title.