It's no secret around here that we're huge fans of HBO's THE WIRE. And thanks to Harvard University, we've had a chance to see the creators and actors up close: back in 2008, we brought you video of series creator DAVID SIMON showing up at the Kennedy School. And in 2009, we brought you the only recording of the time KIMA, BUBBLES, and OMAR showed up to rub elbows with WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON

This week in the fishwrap, we've given you 33 REASONS NOT TO MISS THIS YEAR'S BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL, which takes place all day Saturday. Here's reason #34: free passes to the Festival's only ticketed event -- our rock-authors bash featuring NICK ZINNER (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), DEAN WAREHAM (Luna/Galaxie 500), KRISTIN HERSH (Throwing Muses) and more

As our city girds itself for the tsunami of book boosterism that's about to sweep Copley Square this weekend (to refresh your memory on just how incredible last year's Boston Book Fest was, check out our 2009 podcast archives), it seems like this is the perfect opportunity to wax introspective on one of the greatest novels of all time.

^{She's going to rock your world, metaphorically speaking. Photo: Marion Ettlinger}

Last October, when the inaugural Boston Book Festival came to Copley Square, 12,000 people followed. The Woodstock-of-a-book-festival featured 90 authors over two days and 40 events. 90 authors who you've heard of, received recommendations about, waited in line for, and whose material you've seen turn into movies (e.

This week in the Phoenix, Adam Reilly profiles "atheist superstar" Greg Epstein, Harvard's Humanist chaplain and the author of Good Without God: What A Million Nonreligious People Do Believe. What separates Epstein from the best-selling crop of "new atheists" -- The Atlantic's James Parker profiled the Hitchens/Dawkins/Harris crowd for us in 2007 -- is his insistence on defining atheism as a denominational entity with a spiritual, if not holy, mission: "He dreams not of decisively crushing faith," Reilly writes, "but of a future in which the godless and godly cozily co-exist, respecting each other's convictions and even making common cause on issues of mutual concern.

It would be hard to imagine a pair of books about vegetarianism that are quite so different as Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals (which we brought you earlier this month on the podcast) and ALICIA SILVERSTONE's The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet

It's been a year since that night in Chicago, which for photographer SCOUT TUFANKJIAN was the end of a two-year journey that had started with a New Hampshire book tour by the then-junior Senator from Illinois, who had not yet declared his intention to run for the nation's highest office.

A year ago tomorrow we woke up and elected the first-ever black President. A couple of weeks ago at the Boston Book Festival, a panel of pundits kicked off what is sure to be an avalanche of first-year retrospectives on the Obama presidency. Surprise: nobody's happy. And this, folks, is the loyal opposition.

LANI GUINIER says the first year of Obama has been marked by the "dis-involvement of all the people who helped make him president in the first place," adding that if he sticks to his current course, it will be "very dificult to accomplish the change he promised and that we need."

Photo by Boston Book Festival via Flickr

It was hard not to feel cheerleaderish during Saturday's inaugural BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL, which crammed 90 authors into 40 or so hour-long programs in and around Copley Square, and drew lines-around-the-block crowds for . . . well, people talking about and reading from books.