Enter, from stage right, Agamemnon, a man in his mid-forties. He walks from stage right towards stage left in a straight line that runs through the doorway. As he passes through the frame, he trips on the block and falls over. –“Agamemnon – a play in two acts,” Tom McCarthy, Everyday Genius (via)

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, baboons aren’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that bipedal hominids in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, in great gambolling gangs, babies riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around on rocks and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha! But neither baboons nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot. –“AA Gill reviews The Luxe,” AA Gill, Times Online

Does it seem odd that so many top sports stars are born at the same time of year? Almost certainly not, because Malcolm Gladwell already covered this in Outliers earlier this year and it wasn’t interesting then, as it was just a spin on educational year cohorts that most people already know. But here’s the twist: a study by Captain Nemo from the Nautilus Institute shows that 99.9% of all readers won’t remember where they read it first, so we can claim this factoid as our own. Many people fear Islamic terrorists. In fact you are more likely to die of boredom reading this book than in a suicide bombing. Still, there’s an infallible way to spot a suicide bomber: just check out everyone with a Muslim name who has no life insurance. Or now that our secret is out, find every Muslim who has changed his name to Jeremy and bought life insurance. Why didn’t the CIA think of this? –“Digested Read: Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner,” John Crace, The Guardian