Detail from “Juana Knits the Planet,” a comic strip etched onto a single strand of human hair by the artist Claudia Puhlfürst. Image via Beautiful/Decay

• St. Marks Bookshop has signed a lease on a new location: 136 East Third Street, near Avenue A. The plan is to move sometime this fall; “the owners are exploring a transition to nonprofit status.”
• Philip Roth gave a talk at Yaddo yesterday—it will probably be his last. “After he gave a reading at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, Roth insisted that it was ‘absolutely the last appearance’ … Roth did not refer to those remarks on Wednesday. But when the Associated Press emailed his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, and asked whether Roth had given his last public talk, Wylie responded, ‘That’s his last.’”
• The smallest comic strip in the world has been laser-etched onto a single strand of human hair.
• A thought on International Conscientious Objectors’ day: “It occurred to me that conscientious objectors are underrepresented in the literature of war. There are many references to conscience: to soldiers who signed up but later doubted the rightness of the cause and to deserters, to those who were, by our standards, wrongly accused of cowardice. But references to actual conchies, as they were (not always affectionately) known, are thin on the ground.”
• How does a work of art come to be considered great? The latest research in canon formation suggests that the “mere-exposure effect” and cumulative advantage play a larger role than intrinsic quality.
• To the NSA’s growing list of offenses, we can now add “hideously outmoded graphic design, especially in PowerPoint presentations.”