On The Books: Drink your books, a water safety manual doubles as a water filter

Some people think of everything, like the folks over at humanitarian group WaterisLife. They wrote a book on water quality, but went the extra mile and made the pages actual water filters that can be torn out and used to treat contaminated water. My first question was: what languages are they printing this in because chances are the people who need this speak only a local dialect. Sure enough they covered that: “Each page of the book is divided by perforation into two squares. The top half has information printed in English, while the bottom half is printed in a locally spoken language. The first run was printed in English and Swahili to be distributed in Kenya, but the goal is to expand printing for languages spoken in all 33 countries where WaterisLife operates.” [Slate]

File this under “Not Again,” a man named Gary Stewart has written a book claiming his late father was the Zodiac Killer. HarperCollins just published the The Most Dangerous Animal of All today, and the company’s lawyers feel confident that the 367-page work is “legally sound.” The publicist told New York Mag, “If you look at Gary’s photo next to the sketch of the Zodiac next to his father’s mug shot, you can see that there is very clearly more than just a passing resemblance,” she said. “They look alike.” [NYMag]

Paste did a round-up of the last 13 feminist bookstores in the US and it is a grim list. Surely there have to be more than this… [Paste]

The New Yorker has an great Q&A with Peggy McIntosh, the women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley who coined the term “white privilege” in 1988. Her famous paper contained 46 examples of white privilege. “Number 21: ‘I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.’ Number 24: ‘I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race.’ ” [New Yorker]

Check out this sweet infographic of science fiction’s greatest inventions that came to life decades later, which begs the question, was it prediction or influence? Jules Verne wrote about electric submarines in his 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and by 1960 our navy is puttering around the Atlantic is these very submersibles. [The Outlet]