As a toddler, my son once methodically showed me a series of random objects (truck, ball, teddy, clay). Each time I told him I was too busy. Then he tried a book. I just HAD to drop what I was doing and read to him. I still read to my 11yo girl. We’re on the…
I finished reading to my daughter the fourth of the nine “Heck” books, featuring Milton and Marlo Fauster, who find themselves in the adolescent afterlife.. This book features a visit to the Furafter, the animal version of the afterlife. I love the fact that the canine equivalent of Limbo is called “Stay!” I also wept…
Penn and Teller are involved with this story. Worth a read. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995. The game remained a curious rumor until September, 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance…
Judge: Apple conspired to fix eBook prices. #ethics #books The Federal lawsuit claimed that Apple, led by then-CEO Steve Jobs and senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, conspired with HarperCollins, Hatchett, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster to drive e-book prices up from the $9.99 price point Amazon had established. –readwrite.com Similar:The world's…
For me, summer vacation means spending hours modeling shelves full of antique books in Blender-3D, so that the library adjacent to the bridge in my steampunk ship-of-the-line looks more lived-in. Similar:Freshman writing students present their research projects in a suitably decorous setting. … PersonalLooking forward to this! @thepublicpghLooking forward to this! @thepublicpghDramaHumans are being hired to…
I am reading to my daughter the fourth book in “Heck: Where Bad Kids Go,” and have recently finished reading her the fourth Oz book. But not too long ago I read her The Snow Queen, and once last year she asked me to read “Goblin Market” again. A mixture of kid-friendly classics and popular…
Picture books are so unpopular these days at the Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Mass., that employees there are used to placing new copies on the shelves, watching them languish and then returning them to the publisher. “So many of them just die a sad little death, and we never see them again,” said Terri…
With a big Hollywood movie now in theaters, some recent printings of the book have abandoned the classic cover in favor of one that ties in more closely with the film. So high school students working their way through the summer reading list this year will be hard pressed to find a copy without Leondardo…
Amusing visual representations of the color references in a handful of literary works. These are my colour signatures, an ongoing collection which are basically graphs of all the visual content in the books. For example when it might say ‘yellow brick road,’ ‘yellow’ gets a tally, or when for example in The Road it says…
2012 Book Archive. Business, humanities, writing, science. Similar:"I’d never heard of this play before now, but I love it." — World Drama studentA gifted graphic design major in my Worl…AestheticsWithout ComPUNction: Doing verbal battle at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. “It doesn’t have to be good. It just ha…AestheticsSyllabusing Like a BossAcademiaPast Tense, Part…
As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity…
Some of my happiest memories of fatherhood include introducing my kids to the Richard Scarry books. Featuring a huge anthropomorphised cast, with recurring characters such as Sergeant Murphy, traffic hound and pursuer of miscreants, and solid, cheerful, lederhosen-wearing Huckle Cat, Scarry’s tales of mishap, derring-do, industry and shopping always feel deeply, richly safe. Some aspects…
While I can imagine teaching a course that intersects with the interests of a wide, non academic audience, a series of free, optional online public lectures would be great public service, but not great teaching. I’m sorry if this bursts anyone’s bubble, but watching videos on the Internet and maybe writing a few very short…
[W]hat was the business of literature, pre-book? There were words, for sure, and there was culture. There were books and there were writers. They were paid, in fact. Very well. But few writers of today would likely forgo the life of the twenty-first-century writer for that of a thirteenth-century writer. Moreover, the role of the…
If you’re reading this, it’s a safe bet you read magazines. Technically, you may even be reading one now—though I’m not sure if bookforum.com really qualifies. The “.com” might denote precisely what isn’t Bookforum. I’m typing onto a computer screen; you’re reading from one. No trees have been killed. Are we in a magazine? I’m…
PROUSTZAC Enhances and enriches remembrance of things past. Can lead to increased carbohydrate consumption. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.. Similar:How do you know when your #steampunk fantasy cruiser has enough lamps? #blender3d #unity3dhttps://youtube.com/shorts/YF3z91jL7Pc …AestheticsWhy You Hate Google’s New LogoThe new logo retains the rainbow of colo…BusinessPhantasms (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season…
The talented and insightful scholar Matt Kirschenbaum tells a wonderful story. Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in…
I noticed with interest that Kindle now lets you highlight text in different colors. It’s also very easy now to tweet a brief quote. Is it time to revise the blog-based pedagogy I’ve developed over the past 10 or so years, and ask students to tweet a few passages while they read them for the…
Patience and hard work are also attributes of hunters, peasants, and Benedictine monks. What sets scientists apart is their rigorous observation of natural phenomena, allowing patterns to emerge that can be expressed in abstract formulae, which, in turn, can be applied to produce identical results any time they are reapplied in identical conditions. To “do…
That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for…