As much as I support the public option, I’m not sure about its political possibility right now. However, I am sure that my favorite band, R.E.M., and MoveOn collaborated to produce a video urging its inclusion in any upcoming health care bill. The video is simply a slideshow of MoveOn members holding signs with the names of people who need health care now, set to R.E.M.’s “You Are the Everything” from Green.
Leica will be announcing its new lineup of cameras on Wednesday via a live webcast at 9 am EDT. The odds of getting one of these things for myself is low, but I’m looking forward to hearing what my favorite camera maker has in store, anyway.
I had a few logos made for projects over the past four years. Fortunately, I’ve been able to work with friends on many of them. However, I continue to encounter the misconceptions that logos should be cheap, say a couple hundred bucks, or involve a lot of constant feedback from the client to the designer on all possible designs. Here’s why neither is true.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d5837d63-eff2-4969-afa8-0541807c5861)
I like to learn how to use software by finding things online that I want to make and then figuring out how to make them. Currently I’m learning Adobe Illustrator with the help of Smashing’s 50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials.
Radiohead has a new song, “Harry Patch (In Memory of),” which Thom Yorke wrote after seeing an interview with Patch, who was the longest living World War I veteran. You can buy the song or listen to the song on the BBC’s site here. (more…)
Check out a bunch of artists’ Moleskine journals that are part of the Detour exhibits on this Flickr Photostream.
Publisher’s Weekly has the first review of Valdimir Nabokov’s last book, The Original of Laura. The magazine calls the book a “very unfinished work [that] reads largely like an outline.” What’s most interesting and exciting is how the book will look:
Knopf is publishing the book in an intriguing form: Nabokov’s handwritten index cards are reproduced with a transcription below of each card’s contents, generally less than a paragraph. The scanned index cards (perforated so they can be removed from the book) are what make this book an amazing document; they reveal Nabokov’s neat handwriting (a mix of cursive and print) and his own edits to the text: some lines are blacked out with scribbles, others simply crossed out. Words are inserted, typesetting notes (“no quotes”) and copyedit symbols pepper the writing, and the reverse of many cards bears a wobbly X. Depending on the reader’s eye, the final card in the book is either haunting or the great writer’s final sly wink: it’s a list of synonyms for “efface”—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out and, finally, obliterate.
Jed Perl, writing in The New Republic, calls the current show at the Met of drawing in the middle ages “a knockout.” I can’t wait to see it.
David Ulin writes in the LA Times about Amazon’s latest: “The issue, in other words, isn’t that Amazon has erased material from people’s Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can. This is the problem with the digitized canon and the electronic frontier: It’s mutable to the point of being vulnerable.”
Jonathan Lethem has opened a used bookstore in Blue Hill, Maine, called Red Hand.
As many of you know, one of my favorite iPhone applications is Instapaper. I use it to read pretty much anything I don’t want to read when I find it on my computer—generally long essays from the New Yorker, Atlantic, and New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, the latest version of Instapaper Free is simply a downgrade masquerading as an upgrade. This version removes the ability to save your place if you quit the application while in the middle of reading a saved article. However, it has two other qualities that are far worse: it shows ads and it only allows you to keep your ten most recently saved articles on the iPhone. I’m still running the old version of Instapaper, and will continue to do so because it’s allowed me to save over 100 articles from the web to my phone. Whenever I need something to read, I just go to Instapaper. Some articles are months old, but I frequently dig into my archive for reading material, especially if it’s a long essay or short story from the New Yorker. I really like the old Instapaper and hope that I’ll be able to continue using it. If not, I guess I’ll go back to paper—that is the kind that comes from trees.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3db50b46-c6a2-4b5c-b568-9f0a63911a8f)
Somehow, there’s still an application available in Apple’s App Store that lets you enable emoji, those Japanese smileys and other icons, on your iPhone. Instructions are available on Just Another iPhone Blog.
This Flash game on NYTimes.com simulates the effect of texting while driving. It’s pretty much impossible to maintain sufficient concentration on driving and changing lanes unexpectedly. Unfortunately, most people who text while drive don’t ever realize that because they’re never in an accident, despite texting, until they are.
I recently read his new book, Zeitoun, and wanted to note here that Dave Eggers is doing a few events in the Bay Area. Make it out if you can. (more…)
Yesterday on the NewsHour Ray Suarez discussed the future of the book publishing business and its handling of e-books with Jonathan Karp of Hachette’s Twelve, one of my favorite imprints. Karp likens the publishing business to gambling, but what business isn’t like gambling? I found his analogy between the Kindle and the Walkman to be a little misleading, however. Sony, though it had a music library when the Walkman came out, didn’t have the same retail relationship with customers. The comparison would be more apt if Karp’s employer, Hachette, was the one behind the Kindle and not Amazon.
Suarez prefaces the conversation with a brief segment about the book business as a whole, including a story about layoffs at Tattered Cover in Denver and a customer’s book buying binge of a response. (more…)
In the past, I’ve tried emailing large PDFs to myself to read using the iPhone’s native PDF viewer. Unfortunately, it’s extremely slow with any sort of large file, so reading books is out of the question. I also tried importing PDFs of books into Stanza. However, the files tend to lose all formatting and line breaks, giving you large continuous paragraphs of text with page numbers and headers embedded in the text of the work itself. One of the reasons why I would like a Kindle DX is to read PDFs of books and journal/magazine articles. However, there are also several reasons why I don’t want a Kindle. (more…)
826 National has published a catalog of the products it sells at the writing centers’ storefronts: Essentially Odd: A Catalog of Products Created For and Sold At the 826 National Stores. It is awesome.
Powered by WordPress
