The writer Teju Cole (remember him from the Africa's World Cup panel at The New School and his excellent, short novella about Lagos, "Every Day for the Thief") was recently featured in The New York Times' T Magazine in a short feature on new "first time novelists."

Teju Cole, 35 ‘‘Open City’’ (Random House, $25) The book: A hypersensitive Nigerian-German psychiatry resident sizes up the emotional cityscape of post-9/11 New York. The back story: Cole is American by birth but grew up in Nigeria. His first published work — a cartoon — appeared in a magazine in Lagos when he was 15. Since then he’s been a medical student, an art history professor (Netherlandish and African), a photographer, a gardener and a dishwasher. ‘‘I still do a lot of dishwashing,’’ he says. ‘‘But not in an official capacity.’’

"Open City" is also getting a lot of pre-publication high praise. The writer Colm Toibin is moved:

Open City is a meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude. The soft, exquisite rhythms of its prose, the display of sensibility, the lucid intelligence, make it a novel to savour and treasure.

Not everyone is so taken with what Wikileaks has wrought. I'd be curious to hear what some of you think of this take of Wikileaks and Assange, by a reader, an American leftist:

... I’m refusing to get caught up in the Wikileaks tempest. I have no problem with what Wikileaks did (I should care about “endangering troops in the field” or “exposing informers’ identities”?); I agree that [Julian] Assange is being persecuted and think it would certainly be appropriate for his family, friends and lawyers to stand by him. I think the blather about “transparency” is naïve bullshit — yet another mis-specification of the problem (how about an imperialist foreign policy and a predatory neoliberal economic program on both domestic and international fronts, including the accelerated destruction of public institutions and social protection all over the US and EU?), and that — no matter what they understand themselves to be standing for -- a bunch of computer hackers doing what they do is not and never will be a political movement and is moreover destined to produce, if anything, just the opposite of what we keep hearing (and from whom, by the way?) they want to produce, as they’re only likely to piss off everyone with an Amazon or online MasterCard account and reinforce arguments for greater control of the internet to prevent freelance people with attitudes from doing precisely what they’re doing. I really just want this shit to go away, but the silly, opportunistic, incoherent lefties just latch onto anything that can be presented as challenging the state from below and they are so vulnerable to that empty, least common denominator rhetoric of transparency or openness as a political issue that they won’t let it go away any more than the bourgeois media will.

Apart from the Nigerian media and a BBC story this has not had much traction. It is a scandal. Al Jazeera English reports (video embedded below) about Senator Sani Ahmed Yerima who is hiding behind religion. Apparently he divorced another of his 4 wives (his ex-wife was 15 year old when he married her in 2006) to marry his current bride--a 13 year old Egyptian girl. I hope this guy goes to prison for breaking the law. And so do those who officiated the marriage as well as the Egyptian girl's family who agreed to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQJ8Rbgiox4

It's worth the price of admission to hear Cornel West say of the conservative British author--with emphasis--"She has a diverse corpus and I like to devour every word of it." And then he looks pleased with himself. (It's from a series done by the Morgan Library & Museum in midtown Manhattan.) http://vimeo.com/8351184 H/T: Teju Cole.

The brilliant rapper Guru, who also recorded as Gang Starr (with his music partner, the equally talented DJ Premier) and known for his series of “Jazzmatazz’’ albums released between 1993 to 2007, died this early week of cancer at the age of 48. Good obituaries by first Guru's brother in The Boston Globe, then by music writer Jon Caramanica in The New York Times and by Oliver Wang in The LA Times. Rest in peace. The best way to get a sense of this man's oeuvre is to download DJ Matthew Africa's quickly assembled Gang Starr Mixtape, here.