According to Refinery29, Australian skincare line Aesop's New York store was constructed out of 400,000 strips of the New York Times. Newspaper strips, it turns out, make for remarkably beautiful building materials.
Labels: newspaper articles
Friday, December 09, 2011
I hope those were all recycled.
According to Refinery29, Australian skincare line Aesop's New York store was constructed out of 400,000 strips of the New York Times. Newspaper strips, it turns out, make for remarkably beautiful building materials.
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posted by Yulianka at 3:11 PM
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0 comments
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Thursday, August 04, 2011
Testing...
The Times recently published a list of their online edition's most looked-up words of 2011, and BuzzFeed has the top 20, along with their definitions. Feel free to test your vocab prowess! (For what it's worth, I only knew eleven of 'em, and at least two of those were shaky.)
Labels: newspaper articles
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posted by Yulianka at 8:16 AM
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0 comments
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Monday, June 13, 2011
Here you go, Australia! You're welcome!
The London Evening Standard recently posted a depressing article about the fact that one in five London-area parents are either illiterate or only "functionally literate" (meaning they read at the level of an eleven-year-old). While reading this article was a total bummer, I was even more appalled by the racism of many of the comments, including the (possibly, hopefully joking?) person who felt that "any adult over the age of 18 in England should be subject to a literacy test and deported to Australia should they be found lacking".
Labels: Literacy, newspaper articles
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posted by Gort79 at 1:26 PM
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0 comments
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Wednesday, December 29, 2010
The end of book-browsing as we know it?
The New York Times posted an article last week about the year-end boom in e-reader sales, which some analysts believe will lead to a huge increase in e-book popularity in 2011. Most of the article is stuff we've heard before, but my attention was caught by this quote from Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster:"My No. 1 concern is the survival of the physical bookstore... We need that physical environment, because it’s still the place of discovery. People need to see books that they didn’t know they wanted."Something to consider, you know? I appreciate the trees we're saving with the trend towards e-books (although I'm certain the e-reader manufacturing process comes with its own environmental impact costs), but their effect on brick-and-mortar bookstores is disturbing. We hear a lot about the loss of jobs, but this was probably the most articulate point I've heard about the changes e-books will make in the way we choose our reading material, and the (negative) impact that will have on the publication industry as a whole.
Labels: ebooks, newspaper articles
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posted by Yulianka at 10:36 AM
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1 comments
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Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Nothing says "summer" like overblown Czech prose
I just don't know about your list of the top 60 books to read this summer, Los Angeles Times. I mean, I'm with you on the Daniel Pinkwater and Meg Cabot and China Miéville releases, but a bunch of Milan Kundera essays on art? That just sounds painful.Labels: newspaper articles, Upcoming Books
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posted by Yulianka at 8:39 AM
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0 comments
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Monday, May 24, 2010
Swedish smackdown
If you're a fan of Steig Larsson's hugely successful Millenium Trilogy, be sure to check out the Times article "The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson". It's a little wordy (eight pages), but offers a great breakdown of the many, many scandals, squabbles, and conspiracy theories surrounding Mr. Larsson's untimely death in 2004. I've never read one of his books, but now I'm mildly tempted--sure, there's always a risk it will turn out to be the adult mystery/suspense equivalent of Twilight, but literary frenzies always make me curious.Labels: newspaper articles, Steig Larsson, Such wrongness
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posted by Yulianka at 8:28 AM
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2 comments
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Thursday, May 06, 2010
Bat country
According to Cinematical, Hollywood is eyeing a movie adaptation of one of the real incidents in journalist Hunter S. Thompson's life. Shortly before his death in 2005, Thompson set out to help a young woman who had been wrongly imprisoned. His 2004 article "Prisoner of Denver" tells the story of Lisl Auman, who was arrested in 1997 for a break-in. She was handcuffed in a police car when her accomplice was involved in a fatal shoot-out with police that killed an officer, but she was still found guilty of a felony murder and sentenced to life without parole. She wrote to Thompson from prison and he became a champion for her cause.Labels: Hunter S. Thompson, Movie Adaptations, newspaper articles
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posted by Yulianka at 10:44 AM
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0 comments
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Thursday, October 08, 2009
The ladies love him...
The New York Times asks: Is Archie Andrews a bigamist? I ask: who cares?
Labels: Comic news, newspaper articles
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posted by Yulianka at 1:39 PM
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2 comments
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Monday, August 31, 2009
Popular fiction in the classroom?
There's an article up on the New York Times website about a teacher in Atlanta who allows her students to read whatever they want to* in her middle-school literature class. The students explore their reading via journal entries and one-on-one discussions with the teacher. There seems to be debate over how this unique approach affected the students' standardized test scores, but I think it's an interesting idea--when I was a kid, I had a friend who read nothing but those written-by-committee Nancy Drew paperbacks, and while the stories weren't all that great, she seemed to get a lot from their clear, easy-to-read writing style, and became a solid writer herself. I'm not saying there's no value to force-feeding kids The Jungle or The Great Gatsby, but this article did have me wondering if there might be some middle ground. What if teachers chose classic novels, and then asked students to choose a modern novel with a similar theme? Let the kids read Stephenie Meyer, but then point 'em at a Bronte novel, or guide them from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park.
Of course, another option might be just to choose more kid-friendly required reading. In my experience, it is very, very difficult to interest a reluctant reader in, say, Ethan Frome. Many children find the language off-putting, and the ones who can get past the language are creeped out by the subject matter. But why not choose something like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, or Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express, or the Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel? All of these stories have their pluses and minuses, but if the idea is to expose a young reader to a classic novel, it might not be a bad idea to choose something highly readable. And if all else fails, I think teachers should stick to teaching the books that they love, because kids do respond to genuine enthusiasm... even if it's genuine enthusiasm over Bartleby the Scrivener.
*Except Gossip Girl books or novels based on video games, apparently.
Labels: newspaper articles, schools
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posted by Yulianka at 1:09 PM
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2 comments
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Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Laura Ingalls Wilder's name-taking, butt-kicking spawn
Salon.com has an article up about Rose Wilder Lane, the oldest daughter of beloved children's writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Salon piece draws on both an upcoming book by Wendy McClure about the Wilders and a New Yorker article on the same subject by Judith Thurman, and gives a quick summary of Wilder Lane's life and work. Apparently, Ms. Wilder Lane was quite the hell-raiser, and enjoyed a long and volatile career as a journalist, political activist, and ghostwriter. The article covers some pretty eye-brow-raising stuff, making it well worth checking out....Labels: Classic books, newspaper articles
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posted by Yulianka at 4:54 PM
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0 comments
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Monday, August 25, 2008
Nothing but good times ahead...?
According to this article in the Daily Mail, broadcasters will be showing a brand-spanking-new adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (you know, the book about the hard-working, pious girl who is raped by her employer and abandoned by her husband and eventually executed) as "as a tonic to the gloomy economic outlook". Note to self: Never take a tonic for anything from a Daily Mail staff member.
Labels: newspaper articles, Non-Wordcandy books
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posted by Yulianka at 3:16 PM
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0 comments
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Friday, November 30, 2007
Bad movies abound.
New York Times book reviewer Rachel Donadio just wrote an article about the increasingly tangled relationship between books and movies. According to Donadio's article, some publishers are now partnering directly with movie producers to make movie adaptations of their books. This means that they will have more influence over the movie versions of their stories, which (one hopes) may lead to better films.
Film adaptations are always a hot issue here at Wordcandy--in our opinion, way too many great books turn into cow manure on the big screen. Some books just aren't meant for Hollywood, which makes Donadio’s article seriously scary. Will all the books of the future read like movie scripts? (Even worse, will authors be sending advance copies of their books to movie producers before book reviewers like us?) We can't imagine that a closer relationship with agressively-test-marketed Hollywood will improve the publishing industry. After all, how often do you hear that the movie version was better than the book?
Labels: Movie Adaptations, newspaper articles
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posted by Gort79 at 5:01 PM
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0 comments
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Monday, November 26, 2007
A swift (visual) punch to the eye
Slate is currently featuring an entertaining but much too short slide show about the evolution of children's book art from the dull "improving" stories of the mid-19th century to the weirder and more dynamic world of 20th-century children's classics. Unfortunately, such a tiny collection (only twelve images, and two of 'em are Sendak pictures) means that Slate's story covers less than one artist per decade*.*We were sorry to see that images from author/illustrators Peter S. Newell, author of The Slant Book, and Norman Lindsay, author of The Magic Pudding, didn't make the cut.
Above image from "Goop Tales Alphabetically Told", by Gelett Burgess, 1904
Labels: Children’s Books, Illustrations, newspaper articles
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posted by Yulianka at 8:55 AM
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0 comments
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
Stay gold
The New York Times is currently featuring an essay about S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders, which is enjoying its fortieth anniversary this year.While Hinton's West-Side-Story-esque melodrama has always seemed a little cheeseball to me, I admire her achievement: Hinton started writing The Outsiders when she was a mere fifteen-year-old whippersnapper, but it went on to become the best-selling young-adult novel of all time. (Even better, it holds the #43 spot on the American Library Association's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books* list!)
*Which makes for fascinating reading, all by itself. Did you know that A Wrinkle in Time has been challenged more times than such classics as Curses, Hexes, and Spells, The New Joy of Gay Sex, and Howard Stern's "manifesto", the elegantly titled Private Parts? Terrifying, isn't it?
Labels: newspaper articles, S. E. Hinton
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posted by Yulianka at 10:24 AM
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