January 2012
7 posts
Mexican WhiteBoy Banned in Tucson › Matt de la... →
Tucson schools have just “shut down” all courses related to Mexican American Studies (in essence, banning Chicano authors). If you’re familiar with Tucson’s racial makeup, you know this means that literally thousands of Chicano students will no longer be allowed to see a reflection of themselves in literature. The teachers literally had to pack up the books and remove them from their...
Publishers Claim Digital Rights Over Older Titles... →
Open Road Integrated Media has been signing up the authors of well-known older book titles for digital distribution, under the theory that the previous contracts didn’t mention digital rights, so they remain with the authors, who can sign new deals relating to them. The established publishers, who don’t want the competition for the same titles in print on their backlists, disagree.
Many Things Have Happened →
A girl came home from her first semester at college. I am frequently amazed all anew at the fluidity of a concept like normal: one minute you’re lying in a hospital bed, holding a little red burrito which a stranger has just handed you and saying to yourself, “Just exactly what have I done to my heretofore agreeable life?” The next minute the burrito is calling you long...
The Next Ice Age and the Anthropocene -... →
growing body of research concluding that what was once seen as an inevitable descent into the next ice age has been put off for a very long time by the building blanket of greenhouse gases generated by humanity’s burst of fossil fuel combustion.
School ADD Isn’t Homeschool ADD | Laura Grace... →
After giving the teacher kudos for dealing with a classroom full of children and acknowledging the difficulty of meeting all their needs, I tried to stand up for my child (although I felt like a mother bear defending her cub from nicely dressed predators). I said the behaviors she noted actually seemed normal for a six-year-old boy, after all, children are in the process of maturing and are not...
The 2011 Cybils Finalists →
Shortlists of the best children’s and YA books of 2011. Whee!
December 2011
30 posts
A Found Journal & A Note to Writer-Parents of... →
“The baby woke up and there were more babies and more wakings. But I kept writing, two stories at a time, leaving pages empty to take care of kids — abandoning journals, abandoning this small extra step of clarity, learning to do it in my head and on scraps of paper, finding some small measure of time to write and write and write …”
Twitter followers are worth $2.50 each a month?... →
Now PhoneDog wants its followers back, and it also wants a third of a million dollars in damages: $2.50 for every one of the account’s 17,000 followers, multiplied by the number of months since Kravitz left his job.
Present Tensions, or It's All Happening Now — The... →
Present tense vs past tense in fiction.
Wisteria and Sunshine Tidings →
Lesley Austin’s new endeavor, coming soon. Color me excited!
What Publishers Don't Do →
…authors know that they can self-publish, or do many of the other options that are called self-publishing, and they can see the advantages of those options: control, immediacy, speed, flexibility. If all traditional publishing can muster on its side are the cozy relationships with a nurturing editor, then we’ll see many authors defect for the other side. But that’s not...
SOPA and everyday Americans - Boing Boing →
“Alec Macgillivray (Twitter General Counsel, former Google attorney, Berkman Fellow) has a great post explaining how SOPA might impact everyday Americans”
The American Scholar: The Grammarian Was a He -... →
According to modern-day grammar books, “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun (e.g., I saw someone, but I don’t think they saw me) is incorrect, since a plural pronoun cannot describe a singular referent. And so we have settled on the generic “he.” This is, we are told, the way things have always been—good enough for Jonathan Swift or Jane Austen. Except that what was in fact good enough...
The Best Toys $5 Can Buy →
“Wealth untold, right at their fingertips.”
The empty middle ground of Twitter… « Sarah... →
As a writer I spend my life making other people up. I see their side on many things. It might not be MY side, but it’s theirs and I kind of get it.
DC Women Kicking Ass: What's up with marketing, DC... →
gailsimone:
helenawaynehuntress:
gailsimone:
dcwomenkickingass:
Last week in light of some comments by Tom Brevoort of Marvel regarding the failure of female led books, there was a flurry of posts on the topic from the Beat, the Mary Sue, and in particular this one by Alyssa Rosenberg in Think Progress.
Rosenberg brought up a topic I’ve…
I don’t think this is ENTIRELY accurate. I agree...
In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to... →
Bezos once bragged in a Wall Street Journal interview that he told temp agencies to hire the “freaks.” The assumption at the time was that Bezos wanted creativity. But his creative staff wasn’t coming out of the temp agencies, the warehouse recruits were. And I never met a “freak” who wouldn’t throw over a decent wage to work somewhere lousy if they felt they...
Amazon’s Jungle Logic - NYTimes.com →
Tom agreed: “People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their long-term interest in their community and vital, real-life literary culture.”
Learning from Exceptions in the Brain →
There is a learning style that seems unmistakable in some - and it seems to involve learning from exceptions. These may be children who from a very young age seem to question rules and challenge assumptions. They’re kids who if you try to tell them what to think, they may quickly answer, “Actually…”
“Either Universal has done this deliberately, to stifle debate over its policies...”
– Universal music files fraudulent copyright complaints with YouTube, censors pro-Megaupload song
3 tags
“But using line to draw the world invites chances for that cardinal sin of...”
– : The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents
(Click through for excellent tutorial on avoiding line tangents in sequential art.)
#yamatters →
Disruptive technologies have to be popular, of course—otherwise they wouldn’t disrupt. But popularity isn’t enough. Lots of things are popular without being disruptive (Xbox 360, for example). Disruptions are also necessarily controversial and hard to understand at the moment of introduction. A sure sign that something new is disruptive is people attacking it and debating what it is and what it...
The Grapes of Wrath, the real-life sequel? →
“I expected at any moment to see a line of Model Ts coming through headed to California,” the councilman said. “It really did look like pictures I had seen of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.”
Caroline H. Dworin - A Wonderland of London Stage... →
Our family marked time by the staging of shows. My parents met at the Mermaid Theater when my mother was the stage manager for a Noël Coward production. When I was born, my father was working on “Chicago.” I was 4 when “Starlight Express” opened, and 9 when “42nd Street” closed. At 11, I put this entry in my diary: “Yesterday, Lord Bernard Miles and Dame Peggy Ashcroft both died!!”
Paris Review – Document: The Symbolism Survey,... →
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked.
“I, too, bemoan the lack of picture storybooks. So much of what we see, no matter...”
– Make Way for Stories: There’s a good reason why people are passing up picture books
How Shakespeare got me through unemployment -... →
It began when I was in the midst of a particularly gruesome period of under-employment and depression, having decided to go out on my own as a freelance designer at the exact moment that the economy collapsed. It was positively, well, Shakespearean. Finding free entertainment was quite a challenge, and so one day, while flipping through an actual newspaper, I noticed an article about the...
Page 2 - Five free Kindle Fire apps everyone... →
November 2011
39 posts
I Laughed When I Saw Him, in Spite of Myself <... →
The UK -- STILL Down on Teaching Writing... Why? →
Disparaging tweet about Gov. Sam Brownback lands... →
“It’s unacceptable, first of all, to censor her and punish her for what she said. But for the governor and his staff to waste their time getting a high school student in trouble? That’s ridiculous.” As of Wednesday, the offending tweet remained on Emma Sullivan’s Twitter page despite a suggestion by her principal that she remove it. It’s still there alongside tweets from a recent “Twilight” movie...
What the evidence says about pepper spray safety -... →
The evidence basis behind the use of pepper spray, especially in the sort of contexts one is actually likely to encounter in the real world, is woefully limited. (It’s a lot like tasers that way. In both cases, the research that does exist has mostly been done using physically fit, healthy, adult subjects who are not emotionally or physically distressed in any way at the moment they are hit....
MOM - Not Otherwise Specified: A hair-dryer kid in... →
One of the best things I have ever read.
{poetry/thanksfully: “now I face home again – “} →
“It is a difficult patriotism, mine. Patriotism, by definition, should be difficult, perhaps. Unstinting agreement and zealous, unalloyed defense should be reserved for God or family, not government. Still, the passionate love of country that divides us is also the glue that binds us. A common note of culture, comprehension, and at last, of comfort. We still may not have found what...
Emily Rapp | Where is God in Tay-Sachs? The Shadow... →
People who believe in God are not stupid, although it’s often difficult to parse that out when you hear the so-called representatives of Christianity – who seem to be carefully selected by news networks for maximum controversy – spouting their provocative and often lazy theological perspectives. Bad theology abounds, sadly, but this is (or should be) different from the thoughtful theology of...
Pepper Spray →
Report on NYPD use of pepper spray, quotes NYPD Patrol Guide regulations on its use.
California Penal Code Section 12403.7 - California... →
CA law re civilian use of pepper spray
Watch(via Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis - Boing Boing)
Magnificent Octopus: Familiar and unimportant as... →
“It turns out I know next to nothing about Nazi Germany. What I do know centers around wartime and the Holocaust. Reading about the time before is somewhat horrifying. It’s like Nineteen Eighty-four, only real.”