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'The SpongeBob Musical' will debut in Chicago next year before heading to Broadway.

A yellow sponge makes his bid for the bright lights of Broadway.

This week marked the 150th anniversary of the first time Lewis Carroll told the story that became his beloved novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. On July 4, 1862, Charles Dodgson (the author who would publish as Carroll) boarded a small boat with three young girls.

Here’s more from Brain Pickings: “Entrusted with entertaining the young ladies, Dodgson fancied a story about a whimsical world full of fantastical characters, and named his protagonist Alice. So taken was Alice Liddell with the story that she asked Dodgson to write it down for her, which he did when he soon sent her a manuscript under the title of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.”

In 1865, Carroll published his first Alice story. The Through the Looking Glass sequel followed in 1871. The two titles have spawned numerous adaptations and artistic projects. For instance, the video embedded above features  To celebrate, we’ve put together a list of five ideas on how to celebrate Carroll’s novels. (via The Huffington Post)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

James Fallows comments on superior genre fiction in the Atlantic online: "Some reviewers and blurbers have loved Joseph Weisberg's An Ordinary Spy. A few others have not -- you can go find those reviews yourself. One of my rules of life is: there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive. An Ordinary Spy deserves attention and a chance. Its immediately noticeable gimmick is that pages in the finished book have passages blacked out, "redacted," as if this really were what the fictional premise holds, the memoir of a CIA agent. But the book's real point is conveying what the craft of spying is like -- now, with all we know about failures of intelligence and America's blundering in the world. Weisberg himself is a former CIA agent. Is his account realistic? Well, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence says so: An Ordinary Spy captures perfectly the spy world I lived in my whole career, how we talk, how we think, and how we operate. Joe gets it better than Clancy and is on a par with McCarry.The McCarry here is of course the sainted Charles McCarry, former CIA agent and author of The Tears of Autumn and many subsequent Paul Christopher novels. (McCarry is a good friend of mine; I have met Weisberg only briefly but do know his wife and brother.) . . .But overall I thought this was a very good book. To be put in Charles McCarry's company, for knowledge of spycraft and for narrative skill, is high praise -- and deserved, I think. Check it out."

With the paperback releases of The Tears of Autumn and The Miernik Dossier, and the hardcover reissue of Second Sight, the great Charles McCarry is back in the spotlight.