The Death of Bunny Munro is Nick Cave‘s first novel since his critically acclaimed debut, “And the Ass Saw the Angel,” which was first published in 1989. Penguin is releasing a new edition this September to tie in with his new novel. The Death of Bunny Munro will be published in hardcover by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on September 8, 2009 (ISBN: 978-0-86547-910-4; $25.00). Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the dream of hope to the lonely housewives of the south coast of England. Set adrift by his wife’s suicide and struggling to […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR With the record business decimated by illegal downloading, the live concert represents the ailing music industry’s biggest source of revenue. But as journalist John Seabrook reports in The New Yorker, the live concert business has yet to reconcile two competing sides of its identity. For the world’s leading concert promoter and ticket seller — LiveNation and Ticketmaster, respectively — a concert is a moneymaking venture. For diehard fans of top-grossing touring artists like Bruce Springsteen and U2, it’s a unique experience of “instant cousinship” with other fans (as one pioneering promoter puts it). Meanwhile, Internet scalping on sites […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
[Click image to enlarge] FRESH AIR Economists Paul Krugman and Stuart Butler discuss the way America’s health care system is financed — and how it should be. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, Krugman argues in a July 25 New York Times column that free markets alone cannot fix the health care system. He’s a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and his books include The Conscience of a Liberal, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century and The Return of Depression Economics. A native of Britain, Butler — the vice president […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Century Foundation fellow Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, published in 2006. A former financial journalist for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, Barron’s and Bloomberg, Mahar writes the Healthbeat blog, a Century Foundation project. She has also contributed to Dartmouth Medicine, covering Medicare spending and the possibility of reform. Money-Driven Medicine argues that, over the past century, the history of U.S. health care has been shaped by corporate interests’ gradual encroachment on physician autonomy. According to Mahar, this has produced a system of costly and inefficient competition among […]
BOTTLED WATER: Lies And Propaganda
GOOD: Tappening, the tap-water campaigners, has taken its gloves off and is fighting the bottled-water business the dirty way. Using the old beat-them-at-their-own-game approach, Tappening’s new Start a Lie campaign takes on truth in advertising by allowing you to create your own viral lie about bottled water. Because, as they say, “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too.” MORE RELATED: There is so much wrong with bottled water that it’s hard to know where to begin (read Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania, for starters). But let’s start with the fact that bottled water is the most brilliantly marketed product ever […]
Q&A With Carolyn Wyman, Spam Biographer And Author of The Great Philly Cheesesteak Book
BY SYDNEY SCOTT Junk foodie author Carolyn Wyman specializes in books that tell you everything you wanted to know (and then some) about foods of dubious edibility. Her previous books include Spam: A Biography and Jello: A Biography. Her latest book, The Great Philly Cheesesteak Book, tackles the Rocky Balboa of dead cow sammiches. She will be speaking tomorrow night at the Free Library. PHAWKER: First things first, Pat’s or Geno’s? CAROLYN WYMAN: My book is more of a celebration and comprehensive guidebook to the cheesesteak and cheesesteak stands. I do not rate them. So the question to me really […]
MAILBAG: Please Kill Him
“What about Gillian? Didn’t she write HALF THE FUCKING BOOK, you moron. Best, Legs” — Please Kill Me Co-Author Legs McNeil responding to Sydney Scott’s book review in COMMENTS [Legs, you are STILL the punkest! Keep biting the hand that feeds, somebody’s gotta stick it to The Hand. Best. — The Editor. P.S. Write? The whole book is quotes from other people!]
RECONSIDER THIS: Please Kill Me
BY SYDNEY SCOTT So, there I am. It’s 2004, sophomore year of high school, and I’m wearing my black and pink Hot Topic t-shirt, studded belt, and ripped jeans. My favorite bands were Avenged Sevenfold and Good Charlotte and I was trying my best to appear all angst ridden and mad at the world. I pretended to like the Sex Pistols even though I couldn’t really get into them and feigned disinterest in school when in reality I enjoyed it. This is what punk is in the suburbs these days. Imagine how my whole world changed when I picked up […]
RIP: Author Frank McCourt Dead At 78
NEW YORK TIMES: Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn. The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt. Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR The New Republic senior editor Jonathan Cohn discusses power players of health care reform, including the insurance lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, the American Medical Association and Congress. Cohn is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price, in which he makes a case for universal health care coverage through a government-regulated, single-payer system. He writes about health care for The New Republic’s blog The Treatment. RADIO TIMES Hour One A behind the scenes look at how the case against Former State Senator Vince Fumo was built […]
THE RELUCTANT COMMUNIST: The Amazing Tragic Life Of A G.I. Imprisoned In North Korea For 40 Years
LOS ANGELES TIMES: In 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, a skinny 24-year-old who was terrified of being sent to what he considered a sure death in Vietnam. One night, after guzzling 10 beers for courage, he abandoned his sense of duty and freedom as he knew it to stumble across the border into North Korea, a desperate midnight maneuver that led to four lost decades in communist captivity. Jenkins quickly became the Pyongyang government’s most prized Cold War pawn. He starred in propaganda movies and memorized the inflated […]
THE TYRANNY OF MINDLESS PLEASURE: George Orwell’s Police State Vs. Aldous Huxley’s Dunce State
[via RECOMBINANT RECORDS] WIKIPEDIA: The book originated with Postman’s delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell’s 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell’s 1984 where they were oppressed by pain. Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from the vision offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and […]
ON THE INTERNETS: The Astronomical Cost Of Free
The first ever YouTube, starring YouTube co-creator Jawed Karim, is incredibly lame. Nonetheless, it has been viewed 805,990 times. THE TELEGRAPH: Innumerable jaded web entrepreneurs will tell you how easy it is to get thousands of people to glance at a site, but how tortuous it is to get people to stick around or even come back again the following day. Not only do you have to fulfill a desire that people didn’t even realise that they had, but it has to be done with such style and panache that your service becomes indispensable. While the internet may have dismantled […]