Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a radio alphabet), tunes or morse code.

The voices that can be heard on these stations are often mechanically generated. They are in a wide variety of languages, and the voices are usually women's, though sometimes men's or children's voices are used.

Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are channels of communication used to send messages to spies. This has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in one case, Cuban numbers station espionage has been publicly prosecuted in a United States federal court.

Starting last weekend, police at the University of California at Santa Barbara began receiving reports from around campus of a particularly academic form of graffiti — red spray-painted allusions to the work of the postmodern author Thomas Pynchon, whose 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is (in typical fashion) a sprawling admixture of paranoia, counterculture and obscure literary references.

Писатели, подначенные журналом Slate, играют в игру, описанную Дэвидом Лоджем — назвать книги, которые ты не читал. Например, Джон Краули признаётся:

There are books we haven't read but which it's fair to let people assume we have—my list would include On the Origin of Species and The Wealth of Nations. But books that everybody has read except me? I guess I don't mind people knowing I haven't read Gone With the Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird, but Frankenstein? One I most regret and am ashamed of and plan to remedy: Leaves of Grass.

Приятно, когда обнаруживаешь в себе что-то общее с великими: ни одной из этих книг я тоже не читал. Адама Смита и Харпер Ли, правда, начинал. (А когда узнал, что "Убить пересмешника" вообще-то про судебный процесс над темнокожим рабом, очень удивился.)