Reversal of fortune. Describing how ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence have left the U.S. economy on life support, the author puts forth a clear, commonsense plan to reverse the Bush-era follies and regain America’s economic sanity. — Vanity Fair

The collector. When Orhan Pamuk was young, Turkey lacked a great library, so he started to build his own. As the Frankfurt book fair focuses on Turkish culture, he looks back on his days with the booksellers of Beyazit market. — The Guardian

Nine perfect ways to prepare for the End of Bush. Can you believe it? Can you sense it? Do you feel the deep tingle? Because amid the fiscal meltdown and Obama’s stunning poll numbers and the stress of the election, this staggering fact: George W. Bush is nearly done. He will soon be gone forever, America’s most spectacularly incompetent footnote, the oily residue left on the pavement after his administration’s giant Hummer of ineptitude is finally hauled to the crusher. — San Francisco Chronicle

Monster tag team. Astronomers taking a second look at a distant galaxy have found it is actually a pair of colliding galaxies, each harboring a supermassive black hole at its center. The existence of the black holes, which were fully formed less than 2 billion years after the big bang, suggests that these giant objects could have been common in the early universe. If so, they must have had a bigger impact on the evolution of galaxies than previously thought, and they might have influenced the origin of life on distant planets. — Science