Friday, October 28, 2011
Science fair season is coming up
 Thanks to the fine people at io9, I now know that Britain's Royal Society has recently opened up their historical archive of journals to the public, free of charge. The Royal Society has been publishing peer-reviewed scientific literature since 1665, so that's quite a bit of information (around 60,000 scientific papers), including articles written by Ben Franklin, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton. Labels: Magazines, Science
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Anyone else seeing Anne of Green Gables with a bow?
 Well, Entertainment Weekly has released their May 20th cover image featuring Jennifer Lawrence as Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen. And she looks fine, I suppose, although something about that collar says "Japanese school uniform" to me, which I would have skipped in light of the frequent comparisons between Collins's work and the Japanese series Battle Royale. Labels: Magazines, Movie Adaptations, Suzanne Collins
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Tempest in a Barnes and Noble teapot
According to Jezebel, Barnes and Noble has decided to censor the latest issue of Dossier magazine, lest readers mistake the cover image—featuring the nude torso of androgynous male model Andrej Pejic—for that of a half-naked woman. Behold:  Well, he's not my type, but I remain un-shocked. Labels: Magazines
Monday, May 09, 2011
Eat like a superhero
 Whoa: somebody from the site Branded in the 80s dug up a copy of DC Comics' Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook, a mini cookbook that appeared in the July 1981 issue of Woman's Day. Doesn't the mere sight of those Vegetable Robots make you want to have a party and serve 'em to all your friends? Labels: Comics, Magazines, Old Books
Monday, August 02, 2010
Seriously, dude? Thucydides?
 While checking out the Horn Book Blog, I followed a link to this Harvard Magazine profile of literary agent Andrew Wylie. I was mostly impressed by Mr. Wylie's seemingly colossal ego*, but I think he makes a good point about the future of e-books: the trashier the title, the more attractive its e-book version. I'm never going to give up buying printed books, but when e-readers drop down into the $50 range, I expect I'll start buying e-book versions of the authors on my B-list—you know, the titles you buy because you're too impatient to wait for a library copy, but you're unlikely to read twice. *Also the fact that he twice uses Shakespeare to disparage Danielle Steel. I'm not arguing the idea that Steel is a terrible writer, but Wylie's comparisons suggest that he is unfamiliar with the many, many genre writers who fall somewhere between the two. Labels: ebooks, Magazines, other websites, Publishing
Monday, December 21, 2009
RIP, Kirkus
 Horn Book's Roger Sutton posted a nice preemptive obituary for Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication book review magazine scheduled to close at the end of the year. Sutton acknowleges Kirkus's reputation for nastiness, but points out that was one of the main reasons the magazine was such fun to read. Labels: Magazines, Obituaries
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Behind (way behind) the times
 In a little bit of magazine news, Salon.com's Broadsheet points out that Time magazine's annual "Person of the Year" coverstory hasn't featured a standalone female pick since 1986(!!!). They go on to suggest options ranging from Lady GaGa to Hillary Clinton, but I'm still reeling from the whole "1986" thing. [Note: For serious, Time: you picked Ted Turner and Jeff Bezos. Why not J.K. Rowling?] Labels: Magazines, Sexism
Monday, August 31, 2009
Twilight + wedding dresses = girl-entertainment jackpot?
 In what I can only describe as a desperate attempt to attract really young readers with the fashion equivalent of fanfiction, InStyle magazine asked several designers to sketch Bella Swann's wedding dress. I've always liked looking at the exaggerated lines of fashion designs, so this marketing ploy aimed at the Twilight demographic worked on me. (Okay, and it helped that it was free.) Only one of the dresses looks anything like the dress described in the book*, but the pictures sure are pretty. *Which I haven't read, but InStyle informs me that Bella's mother tells her that she looks like she'd just "stepped out of an Austen movie", so I'm assuming that means Regency, right? Labels: Fashion, Magazines, Stephenie Meyer
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Fahrenheit 451: dumbed allll the way down?
 Sarah Boxer has a nice article up in Slate about the recent graphic-novel adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451--you know, the book about a world where all books are banned except for comic books, which are regarded as stupid enough to be safe for mass consumption. Labels: Magazines, other websites
Monday, March 09, 2009
Time magazine can bite me.
 I've been reading a lot about the new Watchmen movie adaptation, and nearly every article I've seen mentions that the Alan Moore-penned graphic novel it was based on was included on Time's List of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century. Frankly, I'm not surprised. Anyone who's seen Time's list knows that Watchmen is exactly the kind of thing Time loves: it's gloomy, it's self-consciously arty, and it was written by a white dude. Sure, Time includes a small percentage of token female and/or minority writers, but the vast majority of books on their list are bleak reflections on human suffering written by white guys with very little hands-on experience with the subject. Books not featured on this list include, but are not limited to: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath Dune, by Frank Herbert Nine Coaches Waiting, by Mary Stewart Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett See what I mean? Watchmen might fit right in with the Time list, but that doesn't automatically make it the greatest English-language graphic novel of the 20th century. It just means it's the kind of story that appeals to a couple of Time staffers who would rather feature two Saul Bellow novels on their "Best of" list than include a book like Dune, much less something like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Labels: lists, Magazines, Oh, whatever.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Oooh... maybe he was an alien?
 Or Bat Boy! Yes, dear readers, The Sun has taken a break from investigating UFOs and Elvis sightings in order to definitively establish the origins of Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy. Labels: Jane Austen, Magazines
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