I blogged recently about a small controversy over the film Happy Feet. It was about whether the tap dancer Savion Glover (whose website has the best possible opening-title sequence) should have gotten more credit for doing the actual dancing that Mumble, the animated penguin, performs in the film. My wife and I took our kids to see the film for . . .
What do a gym membership, a bottle of prescription pills, and a holiday gift card have in common? You’ll have to read our New York Times Magazine column to find out. As always, we’ve posted some of the research behind the column elsewhere on this site. You’re welcome to leave comments on this post. And thanks to Rory O’Connell, who . . .
There’s a fascinating article in today’s N.Y. Times about Blue Nile, an online diamond merchant that seems to be smoking its brick-and-mortar competitors. Five years ago, this would have seemed most unlikely. As the article’s author, Gary Rivlin, puts it: “People might be willing to buy a book online, or a CD, and maybe a toaster … but a $3,000 . . .
… you should probably reconsider, based on this abject failure.
There is a very disturbing report in the new Consumer Reports about child car seats. Here’s an excerpt: You’d think that in a car crash, infants in their cozy car seats would be the most protected passengers of all. But you’d be wrong, our tests reveal. Cars and car seats can’t be sold unless they can withstand a 30-mph frontal . . .
A few weeks ago, I posted here about James Altucher’s new website Stockpickr.com, a sort of stock-picking wiki. Jim Cramer, the mad genius behind Mad Money and TheStreet.com, where Altucher is a columnist, also likes Stockpickr — enough to take a piece of Stockpickr’s action. Congrats to James. (Hat tip: Matt Hertz)
Let me explain. First, here are the top ten Yahoo! search queries last year in Canada and in the U.S.: Yahoo! Canada 1. NHL 2. FIFA World Cup 3. American Idol 4. Rock Star Supernova 5. WWE 6. Neopets 7. Revenue Canada 8. Days of Our Lives 9. Environment Canada 10. Jessica Simpson Yahoo! U.S. 1. Britney Spears 2. WWE . . .
I would imagine that writers the world over, especially non-fiction writers, look back at their published work and think about what got left out. In my experience, there are two categories of omissions, and they are generally particular to their medium. The first category is in book writing. When writing a book, you aren’t all that limited by space. Even . . .
If you are a professional or college athlete, one of the worst things you can do is lose your playbook. This is also a really bad idea if you work for someone who’s trying to be president of the United States. But that’s what happened to Rudy Giuliani: someone left behind his master plan, and someone from a rival’s camp . . .
For those of you who like to play our quizzes (see here and here and here and here), here’s a new one. But there are a couple of caveats/rule changes. First I’ll give the quiz, and then I’ll explain the rules. The quiz: I will soon be appearing on a TV show that, if you think about it, fits pretty . . .
There’s an interesting news brief in today’s N.Y. Times about a report just issued by the Food Marketing Institute about shoplifting in supermarkets. In previous years, health and beauty products were the most frequently shoplifted items, making up 23% of all stolen items in 2000. But last year, the percentage of health and beauty products had fallen to 14% of . . .
The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a guest OpEd columnist in the N.Y. Times, has an interesting piece today (subscription required) about W.E.B. DuBois’s famous prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line. The prediction, Patterson writes, had two components to it: “One side was the near complete exclusion of African-Americans and other minorities from the . . .
John Rockwell wrote an impassioned essay in the N.Y. Times about how the tap-dancing master Savion Glover is the unsung hero of Happy Feet. It was Glover who wore a motion-capture bodysuit and performed all the dancing that was then turned into the animated dancing of Mumble, the film’s penguin star. While conceding that the film’s director, George Miller, has . . .
A few months back, we wrote about one hospital’s very creative effort to get its medical staff to do a better job of washing their hands. Because so many people die in hospitals each year from bacterial infections they acquire while being treated for something else, the Institute of Medicine had sounded a loud alarm, urging all hospitals to do . . .
As James Altucher reports on his daily blog watch on TheStreet.com, the sale of domain names remains a very big business. This year, Diamonds.com went for $7.5 million, Vodka.com for $3 million, and Cameras.com for $1.5 million. According to DNJournal‘s list of the top sales in 2006, the 23rd biggest sale, going for $242,400, was Mortage.com. Not Mortgage.com, mind you, . . .
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has just released its annual list of the most popular dog names. I will list them below and, just for kicks, I’ll put in parentheses each name’s rank among the most popular boy or girl baby names in the U.S. If a dog name doesn’t have a number next to . . .
Has anyone else noticed that the print edition of the Wall Street Journal is kind of funky these last days of 2006? The front pages of each section are printed on the regular newsprint we’re accustomed to, but the inside pages are on a different paper stock — whiter and stiffer and just plain strange. If I had to guess . . .
A reader named Jennifer Zahren wrote recently with an interesting question: are modern children’s books shorter than they used to be (Jennifer certainly thinks so) and if so, why? Do kids have a shorter attention span? Do adults wrongly assume that kids have a shorter attention span? Do adults have a shorter attention span? Do the parents have less time . . .
For newspapers, the day after Christmas is generally a very slow news day. The good news about this is that it means more room for feature articles. In today’s N.Y. Times, there are a bunch of good ones: 1. The slight uptick in homicides in New York City this year is partially due to “reclassified” homicides — deaths linked to . . .
Ségolene Royal, the Socialist Party’s nominee for president of France, is gathering momentum not by downplaying her feminine side (as Hillary Clinton apparently feels compelled to do) but by emphasizing it, portraying herself “as the mother-protector of the nation.” Here’s how one French union leader assesses Royal: “A woman is more sensitive than a man, much more interested in the . . .
Laura Levine is a friend of mine who these days is known for her primitive-sophisticated illustrations but who used to shoot a lot of great photos of musicians. Here’s her photo of James Brown, taken in NYC in 1984, posted here on the day of his death.
Last week, I noted that the Wall Street Journal‘s best-seller chart listed Jimmy Carter’s current book as simply “Palestine,” while other charts listed it as “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” while Amazon.com listed it as “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” and I wondered why the WSJ chose to omit the word “Apartheid.” In today’s printed version of the WSJ‘s list, there’s been . . .
I wrote the other day that my undergrad alma mater, Appalachian State University, just won its second consecutive football championship. Today, A.S.U. won something else: a year-end award from Yahoo’s “The 9” webcast. Their achievement? The best university recruitment video ever. (Hint: Not!) As an alum, I had the great honor of accepting this dubious achievement award for A.S.U. You . . .
So Tom DeLay has started a blog — although if you take note of the footlines, you’ll see that most of the entries are written by other contributors. Still, DeLay seems to agree with Time magazine, which recently gave its person-of-the-year award to “you” — i.e., all of us who are using the Web to shape modern life and discourse . . .
Walking around the Lincoln Center neighborhood recently, I noticed some eye-catching signage: a wrap-around billboard touting NBC’s Today Show as the No. 1 talk show in America. This was very noteworthy, but not necessarily for the reason you might think. The most obvious reason for this billboard is for NBC to proclaim that: You see, America, even though we lost . . .
I posted last week about the controversy surrounding Jimmy Carter’s latest book, which is called either Palestine or Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, depending on where you look. Carter has now responded to various criticisms in a Q&A with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek. (Hat tip: Shakeel Mahate)
Holy cow, people. We love you and everything — really, we do. But what’s happening with the demand for signed bookplates? When we first offered to send a free bookplate to anyone who asked, we were surprised that any people would want them at all. In the beginning, there were a few hundred requests a week. You would input your . . .
A while back, we passed along the news when Google launched its Book Search site. Now, in the interest of equal time, here is Microsoft’s beta version of its own Book Search service. A friend of mine who worked on the project sent this note: After many sleep-deprived weeks, my group at Microsoft has recently launched a beta version of . . .
I recently stumbled across the website for the Book Industry Study Group, which describes itself as “the industry’s leading trade association for policy, standards and research.” Its membership is made of up “publishers, manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, librarians and others engaged in the business of print and electronic media.” The site’s front page features a recent publication, Used Book Sales, . . .
Pretty regularly, we hear from readers who tell us they’ve come across a free (i.e, pirated) downloadable version of Freakonomics, either in PDF or audio form. This guy wrote to say that he wanted to give us a few bucks for our trouble. For a variety of reasons, most of them stemming from the desire to not mistake a molehill . . .
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