Like a lot of hand-wringers, I’ve been lately wringing my hands over the future of the publishing industry. This interview with Richard Nash of Soft Skull has both soothed my worries and stoked some ideas I’ve been thinking about the future of the arts.
What I’ve been thinking is this: As giant media companies [...]
Apparently the blog is working again! Huzzah!
A recent paper in Nature Genetics shows that mutations in two genes tranform an annual plant (Arabidopsis thaliana) that normally grows a few centimeters, fruits, and senesces in a matter of weeks into a perennial – long-lived, large, bushy, and even woody! Their findings are remarkable for a couple [...]
GoodReads is a fairly excellent social networking site, as far as social networking sites go. It’s much closer to hanging out in an actual bookstore than visiting an online bookstore like Amazon, so that’s nice.
But it has the same faults as any other social network:
How can Twilight be both one of the “Best Books [...]
This is a few days old, but I was too busy linking to old British sketch shows last week to talk about it then. Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, is arguing that Sarah Palin getting elected might not be as utterly disastrous for the entire world as most people think. He [...]
While some take a relatively dispassionate view of criticism (essentially that criticism is jaded and interchangeable, because those who “can’t” spend their time criticizing others out of childish envy), I’ve always subscribed to the notion that the critic shows as much individuation as the artist. They are able to attain a certain level of [...]
Idiosyncratic publisher Continuum has a big catalog and good design sense. Their “Classic Criticism” series is small (so far comprised of three titles, from what I can gather) but interesting. What absolutely strikes me about these books – which have “been around” in some form or another for years – is their design [...]
Read the premiere issue of The Modest Proposal!
Periodicals, even on the web, are (by nature)…well, periodical. Quite acclimated to the age of “push button” publishing, we intend to use this space as a frequent stop-gap between issues. Think of it as more than a soapbox. A place for opinions, to be sure, but also a lair of experimental fiction, [...]