The Justice Department filed suit last week against Apple Inc. and two major book publishers, Macmillan and Penguin Group USA, accusing them of colluding in 2010 to raise the prices of e-books. Three other publishers that were investigated — Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins — agreed to a settlement, which Sharis A. Pozen, the acting director of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said “will begin to undo the harm caused by the companies’ anticompetitive conduct, and will restore price competition so that consumers can pay lower prices for their e-books.”

Not likely. What this lawsuit probably will do instead is return to Amazon the power to monopolize the e-book market through predatory pricing to the detriment of publishers, authors and, ultimately, readers.

Anyone who has friends or family members with young girls has surely heard the lament—“she’ll only wear pink”. Well, the thing is, from tutus to leggings to skirts, there is only really pink garb for her to choose from at the store. Is the little girl or the clothes manufacturer the chicken or the egg? And when did pink become the de facto girls’ color anyway?

The topic may seem most appropriate for a fluff piece on Today. But Jo B. Paoletti is an academic, and Pink and Blue is meticulously researched, with references to paper dolls, old retail catalogs and the arcane field of material culture studies. Her findings are fascinating, even if her prose can be repetitive.

Children murder one another in a multitude of gruesome and memorable ways in “The Hunger Games,” deploying spears, arrows, rocks, venomous wasps, mutant wolves and their bare hands in a televised gladiatorial death match.

The juvenile slaughterfest depicted in the film and its source material, Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of bestselling young adult novels, may give audiences (particularly parents) pause — is this what contemporary entertainment has come to? But violence committed by and against children has a long, grisly tradition in literature — as an allegory for adult cruelty, a representation of the emotional volatility of adolescence and a tension-raiser for audiences.

AWP: your yearly chance to spend too much money on too many journals you’ll never read; to drink in proximity to C.K. Williams (who more or less travels with the AWP Conference, moving from camp to camp and collecting potable rainwater in discarded totebags); to make sure the editorial board of the journal who rejected your story or poem three times is at least fairly unattractive, physically; to, above all, not feel quite so weird telling the person next to you that you are, in fact, a writer.

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’s annual conference, the largest of its type in the country, pulls writers of all ages and genres away from their laptops, notepads and typewriters (ugh) and toward a new city every year. This year saw the return of The Conference to Chicago, site of the 2009 conference and an all-around welcoming city for artists. This year was the biggest yet for AWP, with 10,000 writers descending on Lake Michigan for four nights of panels, readings, and business-card-handling. But the (not-so) secret of AWP is its ability to feel at once overwhelming—it becomes hard to tell, when surrounded by so many, which mustache is sincere and which is ironic—and entirely intimate, as if you’re surrounded by 9,999 potential lifelong friends.

Before average, urban, single women were dreaming of taking on life with a cosmo in hand and Manolo-clad feet, they were coveting a life of oversized sunglasses and profitable trips to the powder room. Fabulous, single icons have been few and far between, but it is without question that Holly Golightly is the icon against which all others are measured. Whether on the page or on the screen, Holly is the embodiment of the charming, elusive woman every single girl imagines herself to be. From book to film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote, 1958 and Blake Edwards, 1961) takes a radical turn, but what’s interesting is that Holly herself (played by Audrey Hepburn in the film) is unchanged. Instead, it is the situations she faces, and the way in which her story is told, that create two wildly different stories about one very interesting woman.

Holly Golightly, in either variation, is an odd choice for an icon. She is, as her agent proclaims, “nuts”. She is delusional, insecure and yet somehow equally naïve and cunning. She has lived a tragic life that has left her a broken person, but she has managed to dress up this damage and make it aspirational. Every person who has lived has experienced some form of pain, so it is easy to understand how one could see Holly as someone to admire, but I firmly believe that if Breakfast at Tiffany’s had never ventured from the page, Holly would have been just another exceptional, but forgotten character.     

Here, book and movie rely so heavily on one another, that it is difficult to determine which is served more.