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Tag: on the media

Published March 28, 2016

On the Media: Print is Back, Back Again

In a special report, WNYC’s On the Media recently took a look at the publishing industry and print books. It covers a lot of ground — including the subversive history of adult colouring books, Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar bookstore, and South Korea’s quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature — but the opening segment, ‘Why the Publishing Industry Isn’t in Peril‘, with LA Times books editor Carolyn Kellogg is an excellent overview of the current state of US publishing:

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Published May 20, 2011

Something for the Weekend

The New Museum — Steven Heller profiles Will Schofield, the man behind the awesome 50 Watts blog, for The Atlantic:

For want of money, Schofield notes that he always bought cheap used copies and mass-market editions of the books he actually read. “So before I ever thought about design history, I had stacks of books from New Directions, Grove, Calder, Doubleday Anchor, Ace, and the Time Reading Program. Once I learned the names, I realized I had been long been admiring the work of designers like Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, George Salter, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, George Giusti, and Roy Kuhlman and illustrators like Edward Gorey and the Dillons.”

A Country Without Libraries — A stirring defence of public libraries by poet Charles Simic for the NYRB:

I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside. Like many other Americans of my generation, I owe much of my knowledge to thousands of books I withdrew from public libraries over a lifetime. I remember the sense of awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my fancy, bring it home. Not just some thriller or serious novel, but also big art books and recordings of everything from jazz to operas and symphonies.

See also: Why Libraries Still Matter by Laura Miller for Salon.

God Arrived by Train — An interesting article about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an exhibition on his life currently on display at Schwules Museum in Berlin, 60 years after his death:

Wittgenstein may have gained a reputation as a solitary, tormented and alienated philosopher, but the exhibition seeks to show the many social ties he had in England and Austria, which continued after he was no longer active in academia. Among others, he formed connections with prominent figures such as the philosophers of the “Vienna Circle” (whose school of logical positivism was deeply influenced by his thinking ) – architect Adolf Loos, writer and satirist Karl Kraus and economists Piero Sraffa and John Maynard Keynes. When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge University in 1929, Keynes wrote to one of their friends: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 05:15 train.”

And finally…

Slate has an excerpt from The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, mentioned earlier this week.

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Published May 18, 2011

Under the Influence

Here’s the neat animated short for the new nonfiction comic book The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, co-host of NPR’s weekly radio show On the Media, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld:

The book apparently looks at the history of the media and argues against the idea that media is external force outside of our control.

The Influencing Machine is published by W.W. Norton.

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Published January 21, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Mark Lamster on Gerd Arntz, designer of the Isotype pictographs, at Design Observer.

A new book on Arntz — Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer — has just been published by Dutch publisher 010. A preview of the book can be seen here. (And, yes, my Twitter avatar is a Gerd Arntz Isotype. #nerd)

Barnes & Noble: The Last, Best Hope for American Bookselling? — Editor Edward Nawotka in Publishing Perspectives:

B&N still has enough consolidated power to “make” books. Its buying power makes it indispensable to publishers who need advance orders to justify print runs and the various other knock on effects that entails. They are providing –- via their Nook device –- the biggest rival to Amazon’s e-reader hegemony. And, let’s face it, if they –- along with Borders -– disappeared, how many communities would suddenly be underserved or not served at all? This is the reason small towns lobby B&N to open stores in their community: people are now, like it or not, accustomed to the selection available at big box retailers. True, perhaps half of those who shop at B&N’s aren’t there for the books, but what better chance is there to entice a not-so-avid reader into picking up a book?

The Man with Two Brains — Psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist talks about his book The Master and His Emissary with Natasha Mitchell for ABC radio show All in the Mind:

[T]he idea was that the brain was like a machine that carried out certain functions, and because there were two hemispheres there was twice as much computing power as it were, but we would compartmentalise things. So there was a story that language was in the left hemisphere, reason was in the left hemisphere and something like creativity and emotion were in the right hemisphere. That’s a complete and utter….misconception of things. Every single brain function is carried out by both hemispheres. Reason and emotion and imagination depend on the coming together of what both hemispheres contribute. So that particular dichotomy is incredibly unhelpful and misleading and I keep trying to steer away from it, but there is still, nonetheless, fairly obviously a dichotomy.

(If, like me, you completely missed this book when it was published, author A.C. Grayling reviewed it for the Literary Review).

Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers of The Heads of State interviewed at From the Desks Of…

And finally…

The Gamification of Everything — NPR’s On The Media looks at the future of gaming and creating social change through game design:

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Published February 2, 2010

Too Many Books

“We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Too many books” is one old complaint. Historian Adrien Baillet wrote that in 1685. Plummeting book prices is another…

An interesting segment about books on NPR’s On The Media from late November 2009:

(Too bad about the dreadful Moxy Fruvous song)

The transcript is here.

(via Lined & Unlined)

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