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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the 94-year-old poet and founder of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, sold his travel journals to the W.W. Norton imprint Liveright. Ferlinghetti, best known for his collection A Coney Island of the Mind, was associated with the Beat movement in San Francisco and put on trial for obscenity after publishing Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem Howl. He was acquitted. The travel journals, titled Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013), are expected to be published in September 2015.

Walter Dean Myers, the author of the fantastic YA novel Monster, reacts to a study that found that only 93 of the 3,200 children's books published in 2013 were about black people. He writes in a New York Times op-ed, "Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? ... Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?" The study, an annual look at children's books by and about people of color, was conducted by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

J.K. Rowling has published the "History of the Quidditch World Cup" on Pottermore, her website dedicated to the world of Harry Potter [registration required ]. It traces the history of the airborne sport from its founding in the Middle Ages to modern times. She writes, "The rulebook concerning both on- and off-pitch magic is alleged to stretch to nineteen volumes and to include such rules as 'no dragon is to be introduced into the stadium for any purpose including, but not limited to, team mascot, coach or cup warmer' and 'modification of any part of the referee's body, whether or not he or she has requested such modification, will lead to a lifetime ban from the tournament and possibly imprisonment."

Nick Richardson considers the strange poetry of "Lorem Ipsum," the Latin-ish word jumble used as a placeholding text: "Bits of it have surprising power: the desperate insistence on loving and pursuing sorrow, for instance, that is cheated out of its justification — an incomplete object that has been either fished for, or wished for."

Nigella Lawson on why she became a cookbook writer: "I loved food, and felt strongly that cooking (rather like child-rearing, with which I was also much taken up at the time) should not be the preserve of the expert, but restored to its place in the home. I am not a chef, nor even a trained cook, but as I feel I must remind people all too often: if you needed a professional qualification to cook, human beings would have fallen out of the evolutionary loop a long time ago."

Malaysian officials are asking more than a dozen nations to help find the jetliner that went missing last weekend. The search area for the Boeing 777 was widely expanded Saturday; investigators are now looking for potential motives among the plane's crew and passengers to disrupt the flight.

The new call for help comes after ships and planes spent days looking for signs of the plane in the South China Sea. New radar and satellite data has led investigators to conclude the plane took a westerly turn from that area, likely after someone intentionally disabled its transponders and other equipment.

The new data shows that the plane flew for more than six and a half hours after it ceased communicating with air traffic control.

"The search was already a highly complex, multinational effort. It has now become even more difficult," Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Sunday, discussing the status of the search for the Malaysia Airlines flight that had been scheduled to travel from Kuala Lampur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Officials now believe "the plane may have either flown northwest towards Central Asia or southwest towards the southern Indian Ocean," NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing.

"From focusing on shallow seas, we are now looking at large tracts of land, crossing 11 countries, as well as deep and remote oceans," Hussein said. He added that Malaysia is asking those countries for satellite and radar data that might show signs of the plane's flight path.

From The Wall Street Journal:

"Officials in government and industry have regarded the southern corridor into the Indian Ocean as the more likely path of the 777, but haven't ruled out the northern arc.

"The track from northern Thailand to Kazakhstan crosses some of the most heavily militarized airspace in the world, including western China. According to [an] industry official, many of those nations "would have MiGs up in the sky before you even knew it" to intercept any unidentified flying object."

A semi-naked woman in a sequined Carnival costume. A veiled woman with only her eyes showing in a niqab. Two stereotypes of two vastly different regions — Latin America and the Middle East.

On the surface, these two images couldn't be more diametrically opposed. What could the two have in common, right? What a woman wears — or what she doesn't wear in Brazil's case — is often interpreted as a sign of her emancipation. The veil for many is a symbol of female oppression, the right to wear a bikini one of liberation.

As a woman and a foreigner who lived in Baghdad and Cairo and worked throughout the Middle East for years, I always felt the need to dress modestly and respectfully. Frankly, my recent move back to Latin America was initially a relief. Brazil is the land where less is more — and it was wonderful to put on whatever I wanted.

But underneath the sartorial differences, the Middle East and Latin America's most famously immodest country both impose their own burdens on women with the way they are treated and perceived.

On a recent balmy afternoon, I was sitting at a seafront kiosk watching Brazil's carnival coverage on the biggest broadcaster here, GLOBO. Suddenly, a naked woman pops onto the screen during a commercial break. She is wearing nothing. Literally nothing except a smile and some body glitter. Called the "globelleza," she is the symbol of GLOBO's festival coverage and she appears at every commercial break.

Later programming showed a contest where women from various Samba schools — all of them black — were judged on their dancing and appearance by a panel that was all white. They all had their measurements read out for the crowd. But when one woman said she was a studying at one of Brazil's premier petrochemical departments to eventually work in the oil and gas industry, the male judge smirked in surprise.

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Parallels

Photos Reveal Harsh Detail Of Brazil's History With Slavery

Residents of Crimea have begun voting Sunday on the contentious question of whether to split from Ukraine and join Russia.

Although Western governments consider the vote illegitimate, the referendum is widely expected to pass. Crimea's parliament has already voted to seek annexation by Russia.

NPR's Gregory Warner reports that pro-Ukrainian activists inside Crimea have called for a boycott of the election, saying it was called prematurely and without debate.

But the Crimean peninsula is predominantly ethnic Russian, and residents say they fear being oppressed by the interim Ukrainian government that took over when President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February. Yanukovych fled to Russia after months of protest and bloodshed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will respect the voters' decision. The U.S. and EU have warned that annexation would prompted more economic sanctions against Russia.

Russia voted on Saturday against a UN resolution condemning Sunday's vote, the only Security Council member to do so.

Russian troops have taken control of government buildings and military bases in Crimea since Yanukovych fled. On Saturday, Russian troops made what was apparently their first foray outside Crimea, crossing the border to take over a natural gas plant that serves the region.