This GalleyCat editor loves playing the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game, connecting celebrities to actor Kevin Bacon in six connections or fewer. Would the same game work in the 21st Century literary world?

On the Morning Media Menu today, cultural critic Mark Dery (pictured) talked about his new collection of essays, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. While pondering Christian comic creator Jack Chick and YouTube trends, Dery also outlined a version of the Bacon game that could be played with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani.

Check it out: “The fact that the reviewer is instantly known to the reviewed creates a very odd kind of interaction. The tendrils of social media reach out rhizomatically and seem to connect everybody to everybody. We’re all in the Kevin Bacon game at this point–you know, seven degrees of Michiko Kakutani. Consequently, everybody who reviews you is a friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook or you retweeted them on Twitter or you rubbed elbows with them somehow in cyberspace. And that makes for peculiar social dance.”

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Actress Kate Winslet has inked a book deal with Simon & Schuster to publish The Golden Hat, a collection of photos of celebrities wearing a special hat to promote autism awareness.

Winslet (featured in The Reader trailer embedded above) has arranged many celebrity appearances, including: Anna Wintour, Kevin Bacon, Meryl Streep, and Jude Law. Creative Artists Agency negotiated the deal with publisher Jonathan Karp, and senior editor Kerri Kolen. The book will come out in November 2011.

Here’s more about the book: “Winslet has amassed a collection of photos from an amazing array of her friends and renowned personalities who have donned this special hat, taken a self portrait, and passed the hat along from one person to another … Winslet found inspiration for this project in her friends Margret Dagmar Ericsdottir and Ericsdottir’s son Keli, who lives with a severe form of non-verbal autism … Despite hardship, Keli now composes beautiful and deeply moving poetry. One of the poems, among the many included in the book, is called ‘The Golden Hat,’ which describes a magical hat that enables an autistic boy to communicate.”