May 19 marks the 89th birthday of Malcolm X. In this essay, Edward Pittman reflects on how Malcolm X influenced his search for black identity and love during the late 1970s. This essay is excerpted from Pittman's memoir, Home Before Dark.

Here is an article about the career of a pink gorilla, with a cameo by A.J. Daulerio.

Turns out Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania senator who jumped the aisle to become a Democrat in 2009, is a sensual man. "Arlen Specter's Memoir: The Five Steamiest Passages" is the headline of an Amanda Terkel Huffington Post article that really delivers. Excerpts:

To commemorate the event, in addition to We the People, Edward Norton's HBO documentary that brought a tear to Obama's eye (aww, remember when everybody loved him?), campaign manager David Plouffe has a new memoir out called The Audacity to Win.

Joyce Maynard, the writer who had a creepy affair with gross old J.D. Salinger when he was 53 and she a mere 18, is still tattling on the egregiously overrated recluse. And it sounds like he has it coming. "[S]he's taking him on again in 'Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial and Overcoming Anorexia,' a series of essays compiled by Kate Taylor. Maynard, without identifying Salinger by name, discusses the relationship she had after her freshman year at Yale with 'a man who liked that I was skinny and, in fact, taught me new tricks to stay that way. Over the year that followed, the relationship grew increasingly difficult for many reasons, but I suspect his policing of my body and my eating was one of them . . . The experience of having another person - even one I loved - telling me what to eat and forbidding certain foods filled me with frustration . . . '"