• The anonymous blogger behind Baghdad Burning (published in book form by Marion Boyars) has been longlisted “for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson Prize, [Britain’s] most valuable award in non-fiction.”

• If you’d told me yesterday that A.M. Homes wrote for The L Word and bought an East Hampton house so she could park on the village beaches for free, I would have said “bollocks” (in my uncharming American accent). But you would have been right.

• Christopher Rowe is serving on this year’s Nebula jury, and he wants your recommendations. (Via Gwenda Bond.)

• Justine Larbalestier has done a wonderful thing. She’s published Magic Lessons, the sequel to Magic or Madness, and provided me with a new book to send my fantasy-obsessed stepdaughter. Larbalestier also shares a bunch of things she’s “learned about the publishing biz” in the last few years.

• Yorkshire County marks the 150th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s death at age 38.

• Cambridge University has announced plans to award Margaret Drabble an honorary doctorate in letters.

• Randa Jarrar, who makes PEN’s list of new and emerging writers, announces that her novel (which includes the Million Writers Award-winning You Are a 14-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Just Moved To Texas) will be published in 2007 by Other Press.

• On the 95th anniversary of the Triangle Waist Company fire, novelist Katharine Weber remembers the 146 young and mostly female garment workers who died in the tragedy, and suspects that children, “as young as 9 or 10, [who] worked in most New York garment factories, sewing buttons and trimming threads,” were among the unidentified remains. Nowadays, she points out, U.S. children don’t die in factory accidents — but only because we outsource everything, even (especially?) our tragedies. Weber’s novel based on the Triangle disaster appears in June.

• “Will video games ever have their ‘Moby Dick’ or ‘Citizen Kane’?” (See also Jim Hanas’ interview with Sean Stewart; thanks, Marie.)