Abbey Road is one of the most famous recording studios across the universe.

And according to the Financial Times yesterday, EMI Group Ltd. is giving the studio a ticket to ride to reduce leftover debt from a 2007 buy-out. While EMI has made no reply to reports of the sale, the studio is expected to go for tens of millions of pounds.

The studio has been used to record Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, various albums from The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, Coldplay, Wings, and The Lord of the Rings soundtrack—and, as should hopefully be obvious, The Beatles’ album by the same name.

Not that that’s enough to save it. According to Pete Nash, chairman of the British Beatles Fan Club,

“Modern recordings can be done these days in somebody’s bedroom. I think the glory days of Abbey Road are long gone. It might be more valuable as a museum.”

Still, it’s possible people might come together to save the studio. On BBC Newsnight, Paul McCartney said,

“There are a few people who have been associated with the studio for a long time who were talking about mounting some bid to save it. I sympathise with them. I hope they can do something, it’d be great. I have got so many memories there with The Beatles. It still is a great studio. So it would be lovely if somebody could get a thing together to save it.”

Ian McMillan writes in The Guardian:

“Get lost. Just get lost, will you? Get lost once a week, maybe. Turn left when you should have turned right, east when the map says west. Get out at a station and just walk, straight as a vapour trail, until you’ve got no idea where you are. Don’t ask anybody. Carry no map, no app, no nav powered by sat.

The world will seem a brighter place, somehow. Well, it worked for me in Accrington. Next week, do it blindfold: that’s deep lost.”

Which seemed like exactly the right thing to read at two in the morning, which it is right now.

JD Salinger died today at age 91, which came as a bit of a surprise, since I had no idea he was still alive.

The first time I read Catcher in the Rye was last August, which was too bad, since I suspect that if I had read it much earlier (read: when I was still filled with gripping teenage angst and disenchantment), I would have loved it. That being said, there is no question it’s a classic, and that Salinger is a phenomenal writer. He also hadn’t published anything since the mid-60s, which is why I assumed he was dead, and why I’m so excited to see what happens with his unpublished work. On one hand, it almost certainly exists, but on the other, some authors have a habit of wanting their work destroyed after death (see also: Vladmir Nabokov’s Original of Laura), and hopefully Salinger doesn’t fall into the later category. Though that doesn’t necessarily mean their wishes will be respected (see also: Vladmir Nabokov’s Original of Laura).

Christopher Tayler writes, in the Guardian,

“Salinger’s silence since 1965 has invited a lot of speculation. Like Thomas Pynchon, but perhaps less deliberately, he turned himself into a cardinal symbol of the cultural refusenik in an age of non-privacy: someone famous for not wanting to be famous.

What was doing for all that time? Was he writing? And, if so, can we see it? We will perhaps get some answers soon. All the same, it’s hard not to hope that he left behind some insoluble legal-literary tangle. Apart from the potential for disappointment, finding out the truth would be like Godot showing up.”

On the other hand, in Salinger’s 1974 interview with the New York Times, he said,

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. … It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. … I don’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. … I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”

Which seems a little ambiguous. And so far, the best news from various publishers is, “No comment.”

Sarcasm Inc., a company that apparently exists, has developed a new punctuation mark to denote the use of sarcasm. The argument seems to be that if exclamations and questions have their own punctuation, why not sarcasm?! According to a press release,

“Statements have the period. Questions have the question mark. Exclamations have the exclamation mark. When you see the newest punctuation mark for sarcasm, you’ll know the writer of that sentence doesn’t literally mean what they’re writing; they’re being sarcastic.”

The fact that the punctuation mark itself, which is a spiral and a dot, would be ampersand-level awkward to write aside, sarcasm is already the lowest form of wit. If people can’t get it, the proper response is to make fun of them, not charge everyone else $1.99 for a somewhat disjointed solution to what I’m pretty sure no one noticed was a problem.

Michael Kinsley has an excellent story in The Atlantic about newspaper articles that are too long.

“The software industry has a concept known as “legacy code,” meaning old stuff that is left in software programs, even after they are revised and updated, so that they will still work with older operating systems. The equivalent exists in newspaper stories, which are written to accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine. Who needs to be told that reforming health care (three words) involves “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system” (nine words)? Who needs to be reminded that Hillary Clinton tried this in her husband’s administration without success? Anybody who doesn’t know these things already is unlikely to care. (Is, in fact, unlikely to be reading the article.)”

Personally, I really like shorter stories, which probably has a lot to do with taking Stephen King’s “Omit Needless Words” doctrine to the extreme as a child. At the same time: random experts? Wordy leads? The urge to close with unnecessary forward-looking, closure-granting statements? I’m pretty sure almost everything I’ve read (or, ahem, written) lately involves at least two if not three of those, even when the article is only a few hundred words.

But as Kinsley says (see? unnecessary quoting!), that doesn’t make it OK.

“On the first day of my first real job in journalism—on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Michigan—the chief copy editor said, “Remember, every word you cut saves the publisher money.” At the time, saving the publisher money didn’t strike me as the world’s noblest ideal. These days, for anyone in journalism, it’s more compelling.”