Getting the Good Stuff: Mark Haskell Smith’s Heart of Dankness
Take it from a guy who hates reggae: I highly recommend picking up Heart of Dankness, whether you have a doctor's recommendation or not.
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Source Material: Breaking Down the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay
If the publishing industry really does collapse, as some predict it will, it won’t be the big houses or the independent bookstores that will be most affected, it will be Hollywood. This year’s crop of Oscar contenders begs the question “Can there be a cinema without books?”
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A Year in Reading: Patrick Brown
Here was the reading experience I was looking for! I couldn’t wait to get back to it. I read it over breakfast, over lunch. I voluntarily took the bus to work (the bus!), just so I’d have extra time to read. It was the book that reminded me what a pleasure a great book can be.
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The Joys and Compromises of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball
Take whatever it is that’s important to you – knitting, perhaps, or mountain biking – and then imagine waiting for a feature film about it. Would you be excited or nervous? Or would you simply be dreading how Hollywood would manage to fuck up your passion?
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Staff Pick: Baseball Playbook
“You might have to coach Little League in a few years,” my father told me, handing me a strange, plain book. My son was a week old. It would be at least two years before he would learn to throw a cut fastball (and probably another year or two before he had any real command of the pitch).
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Staff Pick: FreeDarko Presents The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History
To find truth -- and in so doing, beauty -- in the game is the height of sportswriting, a genre usually mired somewhere between tawdry gossip and vitriolic hyperbole.
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Report from the Future of Reading: The Books in Browsers Conference
It’s only through seizing the social reading moment, so to speak, that the publishers can hope to wrestle some measure of control back from the tech companies that have come to dominate their industry.
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Gratuitous: How Sexism Threatens to Undermine the Internet
I like following Lisa's blog because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling. Following it is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone's daily life). She's my Jersey Shore.
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Comparing Apples to BMWs: What Does it Mean to be a “Best Bookstore” Anyway?
Flavorwire’s list of the Top Ten Bookstores in the US was not supposed to piss me off, but that’s exactly what it did. It was supposed to be the sort of article you read and then forget about until someone else runs it again next year. Instead, being the disagreeable sort, I found myself dwelling on the thing and, well, getting pissed off.
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The Millions Interview: Natasha Vargas-Cooper
You are dealing with inherently banal products, nylons, cigarettes, cameras, hairspray; what’s incredible about Mad Men is the allure Draper and Co inject into them, even tag lines that we’ve heard before are refreshed by narrative Don develops behind them and all the psychological reasoning that goes into that narrative.
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Staff Pick: Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap
Like a highly erotic Cheever novel, The Slap skewers the middle class while giving them their humanity and even, at times, a bit of sympathy.
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The Millions Interview: Tom McAllister
McAllister became known as "the ultimate Philly guy." No wonder, considering he grew up in a row house, attended La Salle University, teaches at Temple, and even worked in a cheesesteak shop. But a person cannot be so reduced, as he explores in his new memoir.
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Nobody Wants to Go Home: A Unified Theory of Reality TV
The only non-game show reality shows left are about people who were most decidedly unreal. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that we only wanted to watch people do nothing if we'd already watched them do something.
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