A round-up of what’s interesting on the interwebs this week:
Gary Shteyngart tries Google Glass. Hilarity ensues. [The New Yorker]
To everyone’s surprise, a malaria vaccine has been 100 percent effective in clinical trials. [Nature]
For writers, adopting a second language is more than gaining a new skill set. It’s a rebirth. [The Stone Blog, The New York Times]
Goodbye, chocolate supply. Thanks a lot, ants. [Aeon]
A bigger picture look at what Jeff Bezos will mean to The Washington Post. [The Millions]
A University of Oregon study looks at how the rise of online search tools has transformed the librarian profession. More thrilling than it sounds. [Sci Tech Daily]
The Glass Piano is a wonderful BBC Radio 3 
Not Exactly Rocket Science 
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis
For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.