The philosopher Simon Critchley is a professor at the New School for Social Research. His new book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, is out this month from Verso.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. I’m a total radiohead and have been since I was a kid, so my first move is to listen to the news on NPR, wishing it were better and silently cursing the complacent presenters. Then I check the BBC website for the big stories and also for soccer news, which occupies a lot of my time. My family is from Liverpool and Liverpool Football Club is my only religious commitment. Then I check The New York Times website, which is my major news source throughout the day.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

A. I’m really online a lot these days. I read the …

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A journalist, Adam Mars-Jones, may have won the first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award, announced this week. But academics were among the eight finalists. The prize rewards “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past 12 months,” says its sponsor, The Omnivore, a British aggregator site that gathers reviews of books, films, and plays.

Mary Beard, of the University of Cambridge, was shortlisted for her attack on Robert Hughes’s Rome, “little short of a disgrace.” Beard’s own blog called her Guardian review “mildly donnish, finger-wagging.” Indeed she only damned Rome’s first half.

Another academic, Lachlan MacKinnon, retired from Winchester College, got the nod for his rebuke of Clavics, by the poet Geoffrey Hill, “the sheerest twaddle,” in the Independent.

Visit The Omnivore for a complete list of those savaging and those savaged, along with links to the…

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A belated happy birthday to the Association of American University Presses, formed February 8, 1937, with 22 members: the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, Harvard University Press, University of Illinois Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Louisiana State University Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of New Mexico Press, New York University Press, University of North Carolina Press, University of Oklahoma Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, Princeton University Press, Rutgers University Press, Stanford University Press, University of Toronto Press, University of Washington Press, and Yale University Press. Learn the price negotiated for rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria at a planning meeting in 1928!

Just in time for the 2012 electoral silly season comes an old text, newly translated, with timeless advice for those who would rule.

Among its pearls of swinedom, offered with not even a pause over self-contradiction: Flatter voters grandly, but beware, “politics is full of deceit, treachery, and betrayal.”

Quintus Tullius Cicero set down that and other advice for his big brother, Marcus Tullius Cicero, in 64 BC. Quintus was trying to help Marcus, perhaps Rome’s greatest orator, win election to one of two annual consulships of Rome, the state’s supremely powerful top post.

Quintus’ counsel took the form of a punchy, you’re-just-going-to-have-to-man-up letter. And it suggests that little is new in political thrust and parry: Nothing the younger Cicero told his brother has lost any currency—at all. Statesmen considered shameless flattery to be effectively deceitful the…

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Timothy Donnelly has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Cloud Corporation (Wave, Picador). The annual mid-career award, established at Claremont Graduate University in 1992, is one of the largest monetary prizes for poets in the United States. This spring Donnelly is a visiting associate professor in Princeton University’s program in creative writing and Lewis Center for the Arts. He is also poetry editor of the Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University.

Claremont also announced the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery award, given each year for a first book “by a poet of genuine promise.” This year’s winner is Katherine Larson, a molecular biologist and field ecologist in Tucson. She wins for Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press).

Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College. His new book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. I’m all business in the morning. I wake up sharp and eager and roll straight out of bed and into my day’s work.  Aside from cereal boxes, I’m most likely to read my own stuff first thing, something I’m working on and revising. If I’m not in an active writing phase, I’ll chip away at my pile of research books and articles—moving exciting things to the top, and burying dull things underneath.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

A. I don’t often read newspapers.  I get my general information about the world mainly from NPR, The…

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Academics, and a few university presses (Harvard, Minnesota, and Chicago), were among the 30 nominated authors and books in fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry.

For a full list of nominees, visit the NBCC. The winners will be announced March 8.

All budding authors with hopes of fame would do well to befriend someone like William Jay Smith—someone who goes on to write numerous books, becomes his country’s poet laureate, and is still writing strongly as he approaches age 93.

In My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams, just out from the University Press of Mississippi,  one of America’s greatest playwrights receives a fine testimonial from a fellow author who knew him in his years as an apprentice writer.

Their friendship began when the two young men were undergraduates at Washington University, and organized a writers’ coterie in St. Louis, surrounding themselves with others aspiring to their chosen trade. At that time, Williams’s primary objective was to excel in poetry, even more than in theater.

Smith had been born into a Southern family that had no intention of producing a writer son, even…

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Kate Torrey will retire this summer as director of the University of North Carolina Press. She joined the publishing house as editor in chief in 1989 and became director in 1992.

“It has been a real privilege (and a lot of fun) to lead UNC Press for the last 20 years,” she tells The Chronicle via email. “In making this move, I am convinced that it is the right move at the right time, both for me personally and for the press institutionally. That said, I will very much miss getting to work with authors and the chance to interact regularly with terrific colleagues, both here and in the wider AAUP community.”

“My successor is in for a treat: S/he will inherit an exceptional staff, a great Board, an enviable freedom from bureaucratic strictures, and a very strong list—with lots of exciting books in the pipeline.”

Asked if she will keep her hand in, as a consultant perhaps, Torrey …

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There is a winner. A few months ago in this space we noted a Harvard University Press contest to design a logo and jacket design for the Murty Classical Library of India, a forthcoming series of facing-page translations from Hindi, Pali, Sanskrit, and myriad other Indic languages. The prize of $10,000 and jacket credit on all books goes to independent designer Andrea Stranger, who discusses her design process on the HUP blog.