• Seattle-area writer Ted Chiang has long been one of the local sci-fi community's best-kept secrets. Just about every Seattle sci-fi writer worth their salt counts Chiang as one of their favorite writers, but his work has not garnered larger acclaim. That's all about to change: one of Chiang's short stories is about to be adapted into an upcoming film called Arrival starring Amy Adams that is attracting a lot of pre-release buzz.The Wall Street Journal published a great little profile of Chiang yesterday that you should read.

“He’s got a really good mix of humanity and science, unlike some writers,” said Ellen Datlow, the editor who acquired “Tower of Babylon,” the first story of Mr. Chiang’s to be published, for Omni magazine in 1990.

• While we're talking about Seattle-area writers, Electric Lit published a long interview with Elissa Washuta that you should read.

• So this is kind of creepy: according to GeekWire, at Amazon's brick-and-mortar bookstore, you're apparently only able to buy books on discount if you're an Amazon Prime customer. If you're not on Prime, you pay full list price.

• Greta Van Susteren has a bad opinion about the cost of colleges. Rather than cutting the ridiculously expensive stadiums or coaches' salaries, she seems to think libraries are making colleges too damn expensive:

Colleges should stop building vanity projects like huge libraries and billing students-full libraries are on our smartphones! https://t.co/QBeVKZvIKZ

— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) October 31, 2016

• On that last item, let's be clear: books are an investment in education, and they are non-negotiable. In fact, eliminating library books from a college would disproportionately harm low-income students who might not have the technology needed for ebooks. This is clearly an idea that was not at all thought through.