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Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch Jr. resigned Monday following several grim earnings reports and the company's recent announcement that it would stop manufacturing its own Nook tablets. A new chief executive wasn't named, but Michael P. Huseby has been named president of Barnes & Noble and chief executive of the Nook division. New York Times reporter Julie Bosman suggests the changes may be "a step toward separating the digital and retail divisions, as the company has indicated it might do. Barnes & Noble has been in talks over a potential sale of its digital assets, as well as its 675 bookstores."

Queen Elizabeth II is looking for a librarian (not, alas, the affable owner of a library van parked outside Buckingham Palace, la Alan Bennett). The Royal Collection is advertising for "an exceptional scholar and bibliophile" to run the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. The job, which was first spotted by The Telegraph, pays 53,000 (about $80,000) a year, and the librarian would be expected to work a civilized 37.5 hours a week managing the "unique collection of 125,000 books, manuscripts, coins, medals and insignia."

A12-foot fiberglass statue of Colin Firth has been planted, half-submerged in a lake in London's Hyde Park, recreating that memorable scene in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice miniseries in which Firth's Mr. Darcy emerges dripping and tousle-headed from a pond. Of course, Jane Austen's original novel did not include Mr. Darcy's entry into the Pemberley wet T-shirt contest.

Open Culture highlights a letter from Charles Bukowski, the poet that Pico Iyer once called the "laureate of American lowlife." The letter, a response to an invitation to do a poetry reading, begins by demanding airfare, a hotel and $200. ("Auden gets $2,000 a reading, Ginsberg $1,000, so you see I'm cheap. A real whore.") It ends cheerfully: "They say it's 101 degrees today. Fine then, I'm drinking coffee and rolling cigarettes and looking out at the hot baked street and a lady just walked by wiggling it in tight white pants, and we are not dead yet."

On Wednesday, President Obama will present the 2012 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal to honorees including writers Joan Didion ("for her mastery of style in writing") and Marilynne Robinson ("for her grace and intelligence in writing"). The editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert Silver, will also be honored, because he "elevated the book review to a literary art form." The medals are awarded annually by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Americans will get the same ham slabs and bacon slices they have enjoyed for generations, even after Smithfield Foods becomes a Chinese subsidiary, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope told Congress on Wednesday.

"It will be the same old Smithfield, only better," Pope said in prepared testimony at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing.

But several senators weren't buying the bacon-will-be-unbroken story once Hong Kong-based Shuanghui International Holdings owns Smithfield.

Worried about the impact on the U.S. consumer, farmer and even the taxpayer, they expressed qualms about Chinese intentions.

"Is Shuanghui focused on acquiring Smithfield's technology, which was developed with considerable assistance by U.S. taxpayers?" asked Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate committee.

"Can we expect that after the company has adopted Smithfield's technology and practices, they will increase exports to Japan, our largest export market, in competition with U.S. products?" she asked in her prepared statement.

Stabenow also raised questions about:

- Fairness. "Can we really expect increased access for our pork products in China?"

- Consumers. "Will we see volatility in prices?"

- Precedent. "One pork company alone might not be enough to affect our national security, but it's our job to be thinking about the big picture."

The deal is being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, which monitors and reviews foreign investments.

The Salt

Will Chinese Firm Bring Home The Bacon With Smithfield Deal?

When Alfredo Corchado went to cover Mexico for The Dallas Morning News, he was determined not to focus on drugs and crime but rather to cover issues critical to the country's future — immigration, education and the economy.

But it seems the drug cartels had other plans. Corchado has spent years reporting on the savage violence of drug gangs and the corruption and ineptitude that enabled their reign of terror in much of the country, much of which he explores in his new book, Midnight In Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through A Country's Descent Into Darkness.

The book is part memoir, part recent history of Mexico's struggle for peace amid chaos. Corchado was born in Mexico but grew up mostly in the United States in a family of California farmworkers. He was working in the fields and eventually dropped out of high school. He thought that the fields were where he would spend his life. This began to slowly change one day when a television crew arrived and asked questions.

"I was 13," Corchado recalls to Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "I was trying to look like I was 15. They came up to me and they started asking me all these questions: 'What's it like working in the fields? What's it like not having sanitation?'"

In retrospect, Corchado says he came away from the experience with a new sense of empowerment and awareness that he had a voice and that others might care about what he had to say. Much later when he decided to become a journalist, this moment became one of the many turning points in his life.

He is now the Mexico bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News and has reported for numerous U.S. papers, including The Wall Street Journal.