I chew through a lot of articles, blogs, videos and the like each week, so I’m planning on picking out some of the most interesting to recommend every so often.
Kevin Brooks’ bleak The Bunker Diary wins Carnegie
Brooks’s story of kidnapped kids who never escape from their prison offers no more hope than John Fowles’s The Collector – which it echoes without ever achieving Fowles’s humanism, poignancy and gorgeously literate style. It is depressing both in its nature and its lack of redemption; as a children’s critic, I refused to review it on publication. Brooks has written so many better books than The Bunker Diary that it is deeply ironic the Carnegie should have chosen this one, out of an otherwise engaging oeuvre, to celebrate and promote. It is the latest in a trajectory for the Carnegie prize which nobody who loves children’s books can possibly applaud.
Amanda Craig, children’s book critic at The Independent:
My take is that children’s books, and young adult literature in particular, should be able to explore dark issues. But I don’t think that “darkness” is in itself braver, more honest or more deserving of awards than hope.
Hachette vs Amazon
Every Hachette ebook ever sold through Amazon has been locked with Amazon’s DRM. Now, Hachette can go out and team up with all the other digital companies all at once, but for Hachette’s most loyal, most buying, hardest reading customers, Hachette is saying if you want to keep buying our books in digital form, you have to throw away all those dozens or hundreds or thousands of books you’ve bought to follow us to Kobo, to follow us to Barnes & Noble, to follow us to Google Play, to follow us to Apple.
Corey Doctorow argues that DRM lock-in is more of a threat to publishers than piracy:
The rationale behind DRM is to prevent casual copying of ebook files and protect sales of ebooks, and hence the incomes of authors and publishers. But does it really help the book industry, and does it put too much power in the hands of Amazon and other technology companies?
Edward Snowden’s lawyer vs the US Government
The secrecy of Radack’s work with Snowden requires two laptops beside each other: one standard Windows, and another running an encryption setup that she asks me not to describe in detail. There’s no Wi-Fi anywhere in the office; it’s too hard to secure. “I joke that I use drug dealer tactics,” she says. That means burner phones, paying in cash, meeting in person. “It’s a terrible way to work as an attorney, but you have to.”
Profile of Jesselyn Radack, who works a lawyer with government whistleblowers including Snowden
The Death of Expertise
I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other specialists in various fields. Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.
This is a very bad thing.
Tom Nichols on The Federalist site
Harlan Ellison liked to say that “everyone is entitled to their informed opinion”. Freedom of belief does mean that you have the right to be wrong – but it doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to have your ignorance taken seriously or treated with equal weight as someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Seven year itch?
…the idea of a “seven-year itch” caught traction in a culture of no-fault divorce and became a convenient excuse for boredom with monogamy. Subsequent research claimed initially that such a seven-year itch was confirmed by the data, but more thorough investigation eventually pointed to four years, then other research to twelve years, then still more to three years. Increasingly, the studies are finding there’s no magic number at all, and the number seven, as well as any kind of typical point of “itch,” has just been a myth for decades.
David Mathis on the Joy of Lifelong Marriage, on Desiring God
My wife and I have just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. Being committed to marriage “til death us do part” has given us a sense of security whenever we’ve faced challenges together.
Together As One
President Snow’s Panem address
First teaser trailer for Hunger Games: Mockingjay in the form of a political broadcast. A friend of mine pointed out that this is probably just the message that David Cameron would like to send the Scots ahead of the independence referendum.
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