A Revere man was arrested this morning and charged with the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old Reading man that occurred last Monday, the Boston Globe reports.

John Burke, 25, was charged with first-degree murder and illegal possession of a firearm.  This is in connection with the death of Joseph Ronan, 22, who was shot in his home on Lawrence Road.

“We allege that this defendant intentionally and purposefully shot the victim numerous times with the intent to kill him over what appears to be a drug-related dispute,” said Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone in a statement according to the Globe.

Although details are still unknown, officials believe that Burke went to meet Ronan at his home and shot him upon entering the house.

Burke will be arraigned Monday in Woburn District Court.

Boston book lovers, rejoice!

You can finally back off the edge of your seats: The Boston Book Fest recently announced the lineup for its second annual bibliophile’s paradise, taking place in and around Copley Square on October 16.

The Festival has incorporated a wide range of authors and other media experts as panelists and moderators into its 2010 program. Alongside journalists, comedians, architects, designers, actors, and television and radio hosts are over 130 world-renowned writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Here are some highlights of celebrated writers in each main book category:

Fiction

Dennis Lehane

If you haven’t yet read Dennis Lehane’s books, you’ve probably at least seen one of the movies based on them: “Mystic River”; “Gone, Baby, Gone”; or more recently, “Shutter Island.” The Dorchester native also penned “Prayers for Rain,” “Sacred,” “The Given Day,” and “A Drink Before the War” (winner of the Shamus Award for Best First Novel), among others. To top it all off, Lehane recently edited and contributed to the hub-centric short story collection “Boston Noir.”

Kelly Link

Not only does Kelly Link write short fiction about, as The New Stateman put it, “pirates and wizards, undead babysitters and dueling librarians,” she also runs Small Beer Press and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She lives in Northampton and has one short story collection, “Magic for Beginners,” available for free downloading in case you want to read it now to prepare for meeting her in October. Her other collections are “Stranger Things Happen” and “Pretty Monsters.”

Brunonia Barry

Brunonia Barry worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for nearly a decade, but returned  to Massachusetts (who wouldn’t?) and opened Smart Games, a puzzle company, with her husband. Her self-published novel, “The Lace Reader,” created a media sensation that sparked a bidding war, landing her a $2 million book deal. Her second novel, “The Map of True Places,” was published in May.

Non-Fiction and Memoir

Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande, author of New York Times bestseller,”The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He’s also a staff writer for the New Yorker, which recently published, “Letting Go,” his look at the current state of end-of-life care inAmerica. In 2006, he received the MacArthur Fellowship (you know, the “genius prize”) for his practical improvements to surgical practices.

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn is an accomplished poet, but he is probably best known for “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” a Boston-based memoir about homelessness which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. His new memoir, “The Ticking is the Bomb,” was released in early 2010. Flynn has also been a ship’s captain, an electrician, and a caseworker with homeless adults.

Da Zheng

Da Zheng received his Ph.D. in English from Boston University after immigrating from Shanghai 1986. He currently serves as an Associate English Professor at Suffolk University. Zheng’s cultural biography, “Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveler from the East,” explores the life and work of the Chinese immigrant who wrote and illustrated travel books about the West from an outsider’s perspective.

Bill Bryson

Bryson’s Web site brags that he is “is the UK’s biggest selling non-fiction author since official records began.” Born in Iowa, Bryson spent the majority of his life living and writing in the United Kingdom (apart from a brief stint in New Hampshire in the 90s). He has written 17 books on travel, the English language, and science, including “The Lost Continent” and “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which won the Aventis Prize for Science Books as well as the Descartes Science Communication Prize. They’re awards justly won: Who besides Bryson (and Mel Brooks) can tackle the history of the world with such awesome wit?

Poetry

Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch credits Emily Bronte for his love of poetry. He holds a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. His books and essays have received a slew of awards, including the Lavan Younger Poets Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association, among others. Hirsch is a poetry columnist for the Washington Post Book World and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Jill McDonough

A poet with work in The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and Slate, among others, Jill McDonough is an adjunct English professor who teaches creative writing to incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Habeas Corpus,” was published in 2008.

Kevin Young

Publisher’s Weekly has stated that, “In just ten years since his debut, Young has become a leading poet of his generation.” Kevin Young has published six books of poetry, including March 2010′s “The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing.” He is a professor of creative writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

All of the Above

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most celebrated fiction writers of our time. She’s written novels for adults, young adults, and children; short stories; poetry; drama; essays and non-fiction; and has edited nearly 20 anthologies on various subjects, including H.P. Lovecraft, mother-daughter fiction, and cats. Her latest award is the Fernanda Pivano Award for American Literature, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of her achievements. She’s lived in New York, Wisconsin, Michigan (she calls Detroit her “great subject”), and New Jersey, and it’s up to us to give her a warm welcome in Boston.

In addition, the panelists and moderators for the day’s events include some familiar names in the publishing and media worlds, including Helene Atwan, the director of Beacon Press; Peter Kadzis, Executive Editor at the “Boston Phoenix”; Tom Ashbrook, journalist and host of National Public Radio and WBUR’s “On Point”; Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University law professor, writer, and winner of the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his human rights advocacy; and Faith Salie, radio host (or, you might remember her as Sarina Douglas on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). The events schedule and specific locations will be announced after Labor Day.

A full list of attending authors and media experts, with bios, is available here.

They’ll rot your brain. They’ll make you lazy. They’ll demagnetize your moral compass and turn you into a sociopathic monster. They’ll sabotage your ability to function in the real world.

Sound familiar, gamers?

In the 1950s and 1960s, critics claimed a new form of mainstream entertainment, comic books, were going to do just that. However, many comic book lovers grew up to be productive members of society, and one even wrote Pulitzer Prize winning novel on the subject.

In the mid-19th century, such criticism was heaped on Penny Dreadfuls — the popular, cheap, serialized stories that young adults, particularly males, devoured. The Penny Dreadfuls were so popular that boys of limited means would band together, pitching their money into a communal pot to buy one issue, which they would then pass around, taking turns until everyone had read.

Today, the same charges have been leveled at video games. From politicians to religious groups to parents associations, the critics have been persistent in their doom and gloom toward the impact of video games on culture.

But there’s a growing body of scientific evidence that says, in some cases, video games are better for you than books.

“New technology and new media have always been met with skepticism and predictions about their adaption and areas of use, but they have rarely been accurate,” said Erik Hoftun, publisher of The Book of Games Volume 1 and 2.

Education, in particular, is one area in which Hoftun feels games haven’t been given their due.

“Of course I am not advocating video gaming as a total substitution for reading,” Hoftun says. “[But] sooner or later, educators are bound to discover the incredible educational potential of video games.”

In The Book of Games Vol. 2, Hoftun illustrates his point with the US state of West Virginia.

West Virginia has one of the highest childhood obesity rates in the country. While books, by their passive nature, couldn’t possibly address a problem like obesity, there was no such limitation on video games. West Virginia began offering the popular title, Dance Dance Revolution, as an alternative to standard gym exercises in 157 schools.

The move was a hit, eliciting enthusiastic participation in students who were otherwise apathetic toward physical education.

In another example, The Book of Games Vol. 2 highlights a school in Norway, Vear Elementary, which implemented DDR as an alternative to traditional physical education. They met with great success, according to teachers in the BoG, with the educators going out of their way to note that the children often wrote and performed better in class after the physical activity provided by the game.

These anecdotal examples are backed by research. As cited in the BoG, a study reported on by Reuters followed 50 children between 7 and 12 years old over 24-weeks. Results showed that children who played physically active dancing games for 30-minutes or more per day maintained and even reduced their weight.

And the benefits extend beyond those offered by exercise, Hoftun adds.

“All video games, and adventure games in particular, encourage scientific method of the purest kind. They follow the classic formula of trying something, failing, try something different, and figuring out what works,” Hoftun said. “In scientific terms: Develop hypothesis, test, prove or disprove, adjust hypothesis, test again. So if you want to develop small scientists, get the kids away from their passive book reading, and have them play video games.”

Currently the United States public school system is ranked 18 out of 24 according to a 2003 study done by UNICEF.

In the report, countries such as South Korea, Japan, Finland Austria and the United Kingdom beat the United States. Another study done around the same time, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, gaged the overall progress of the average US student. In the 4th grade, US students rank as well as their counterparts in higher ranked countries. However, by the 12th grade, US students had fallen behind by a significant margin.

James Paul Gee, Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has argued for years that video games would go a long way toward reversing that trend.
“Better theories of learning are embedded in video games than many children in primary and secondary schools ever experience in the classroom,” said Gee in a 2003 interview with The Observer. “If schools want to engage their students in the same way as computer games, they need to drop their snobbish antipathy and begin learning from them instead.”