Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp. which owns the Fox Network (TV interview) and ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins (tasteless book), has announced the company is dropping O.J.’s book and television appearances.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch. “We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

David Bauder, AP, writes, “For the publishing industry, the cancellation of ‘If I Did It’ was an astonishing end to a story like no other. Numerous books have been withdrawn over the years because of possible plagiarism, most recently Kaavya Viswanathan’s ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,’ but a book’s removal simply for objectionable content is virtually unheard of.”

Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel-winning economist, passed away this week. He has influenced us more than many of us know. This post on Townhall.com has several links to the teaching of this free market man.

The infamous O.J. Simpson has written a book to say, hypothetically, how he would have murdered his ex-wife and her friend. His publisher, Judith Regan of ReganBooks, “This is an historic case, and I consider this his confession.”

A law professor said, “He can write pretty much whatever he wants. Unless he’s confessing to killing somebody else, he can probably do this with impunity.”

Simpson’s If I Did It may deal mostly with other parts of author’s life, giving only a chapter or so to the murder, but since he has been found innocent of the crimes . . . I can assume this morbid meditation is only the result of his profound tastelessness. Still, I wish he would find a more useful occupation.

There’s a new anthology of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work, and his two sons praised him at a related celebration event in Philadelphia last Friday. Asked whether they could understand their father’s deeply felt pain, Ignat, the musician in the family, responded:

It’s a fundamental question of human experience, what can be transmitted and what can’t. Fundamentally, we only really understand things we experience ourselves. Having said that, he has spoken very eloquently, nowhere more so than in his Nobel lecture, about the power of art to fill that gap, to build that bridge, to connect the disconnect, to help people to understand without the benefit of bitter experience what others have suffered, what others have experienced, whether taken as nations or as individuals.

(Thanks to Books, Inq. for the link.)

Jared of Thinklings has heartily recommended Eugene Peterson’s books, namely Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading. He quotes Petersen, saying, “The blunt reality is that for all our sophistication, learning, and self-study we don’t know enough to run our lives. The sorry state of the lives of the many who have taken their own experience as the text for their lives is a damning refutation of the pretensions of the sovereignty of the self.”

Peterson was a guest on one the Mars Hill Audio Journals this year, and notes from that appearance as well as his entire unedited conversation with Ken Myers are available at marshillaudio.org. Myers notes that “Peterson believes, [the Bible] is too often read in that superficial way, perhaps because we are in a hurry to get down to the real business of life, which we assume can be conducted well with only a quick pit-stop with Jesus. That is not a good way to read anything important, especially the Word of God.”

Via Mirabilis: This article from Discovery.com:

Charles Dickens was so good at describing neurological disease in his characters that the symptoms were used word-for-word in medical text books of the day, says an Australian neurologist.

The 19th century novelist’s interpretations of diseases of the nervous system even predated formal medical classification, some by more than a century.

I got this link from the New York C.S. Lewis Society’s newsletter. Sort of.

Apparently the BBC has reconfigured its website, and the precise link I got from the newsletter didn’t work. But, in my selfless zeal to provide the best resources to you, the valued reader, I worked my way through the maze and found the right place.

What you’ll get here is two sound files made from voice recordings of Lewis himself in his career as a BBC broadcaster. One is from 1944, part of the broadcast talk that became the book Beyond Personality, later a section of Mere Christianity. The other is his introduction to The Great Divorce from 1948.

I’ve often dreamed that original recordings of Lewis’ BBC broadcasts might be found. Apparently these bits are all that were actually saved. (Yes, I know about the Four Loves recordings, and I have them. But I’m told those aren’t his best work.)

But personally I don’t believe the recordings are lost. I believe the BBC is sitting on the original wax disks, terrified that the release of the full series would singlehandedly bring Britain back to God.