Material from:cnewblog.ru

1. Canada: E-books boost use of Lower Mainland libraries (via CBC)

Vancouver Public Library spokeswoman Jean Kavanagh said the library issued nearly 18,000 new cards between 2008 and 2009, and while a new branch and new children’s memberships have helped drive those numbers up, she believes the e-books are largely responsible.

“There are 5,500 downloadable e-books and we’re getting more all the time,” she said. “I mean, it really is an area that people are interested in.”

Kavanagh said the library is providing training to its staff so they can answer questions about the electronic materials. Training sessions for the public are also being considered.

+ And More from Vancouver…”E-books taking off at public libaries — and carry no late fees” (via Vancouver Sun)

The West Vancouver Memorial Library is the first Lower Mainland library to offer Kindles on loan, a service they started in July.

The Kindle waiting list has more than 100 names on it, which means it could be a year and a half before borrowers get their hands on the electronic reader.

Deb Hutchison Koep, deputy director of the West Van library, said they’ve just ordered six more Kindles to try to keep pace with the demand.

+ RH Children’s Does First Enhanced E-book (via Publisher’s Weekly)

Knopf Books for Young Readers is publishing its first enhanced e-book, a tie-in edition of Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen. The publication marks the first foray any Random House imprint has made in publishing an enhanced e-book for the children’s market. The e-book will be available on August 10 for $14.99, leading up to the August 27 release of the film, which is directed by Rob Reiner.

+ Japan: NTT Docomo and Dai Nippon Printing team up for ebooks (via TeleRead)

When fellow Huffington Post blogger Christopher Ryan sent me a copy of his new book, Sex at Dawn, I have to admit that I expected to be just selectively interested in it. I thought I'd read a few sections that were relevant to my own obsessions, then treat the rest as a page-turner (you know, turn the pages until you find something worth stopping to read).

So what a nice surprise to start reading at page one and feel engaged, educated, and amused almost all the way through. Ryan and co-author Cacilda Jetha have a great writing voice — sometimes wry, occasionally mocking, almost always intriguing. So I kept reading and reading until I got to the bottom of page 302 (out of 312), at which point I was so disappointed that I had to set the book aside for a few days before I could pick it up again. More on that later.

Sex at Dawn fearlessly takes on some of the most fundamental assumptions of evolutionary psychology and some of the most basic beliefs of our time. Among the myths the authors challenge are that “monogamy is natural, marriage is a human universal, and any family structure other than the nuclear is aberrant” (p. 5). They have little use for the one about how “men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity.”

I love myth-busting, probably in part because I like to think that I'm in the same business myself (though focusing on different myths). So I appreciate Ryan and Jetha's questioning spirit, but I have to admit that I can't evaluate most of their conclusions. I'm not an anthropologist who could point to some tribe they may have missed, nor a comparative psychologist who could claim that some other sets of creatures undermine their claims. Most importantly, I have no expertise in evolutionary psychology, so I can't determine whether they've treated fairly the people and the propositions they are skewering.

Full disclosure: I have links to some of the people critiqued in the book. For example, Steve Pinker and I were graduate students together at Harvard. Also, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (not mentioned by name in the text but their work is cited) are colleagues of mine here at UCSB where I'm a visiting professor. My impression of these three scholars is that they are often heart-stoppingly smart. I remember watching Leda Cosmides give a talk once, and it seemed like she couldn't talk fast enough to keep up with her own thoughts.

[Because this is a lengthy interview, I'll include here the full answers to only the first and last questions, and add links to continue reading the other answers.]

Bella: So, Christopher Ryan, here's my first question: How can you reconcile how smart I think these scholars are with, for example, the buffoon that you make Pinker out to be in recounting his TED talk (p. 183-185)? (And yes, you are allowed to say that I've been had.)

Christopher Ryan: That's an excellent question to begin with. Let's begin by stipulating that being smart doesn't mean never being wrong. So while I agree with you that the people you mention (whom I've never met personally) are very bright and very well-versed in the areas they write about, that doesn't mean they can't arrive at mistaken conclusions sometimes, just like the rest of us.

Having said that, the case you mention, which concerns Steven Pinker's claims–made both in his book The Blank Slate and in the TED talk you mention–that levels of death due to warfare in hunter-gatherer societies was off the charts, and then citing as evidence societies that clearly are not hunter/gatherers . . . well, I don't know how to explain that. I'm perplexed by it as well. The Blank Slate came out in 2002, but he gave the TED talk we cite five years later! It's hard to believe that nobody alerted him to the fact that his examples were irrelevant to the point he was arguing in those five years.

Evolutionary Psychology has a lot to offer, but unfortunately it's riddled with confirmation bias. We found several examples of glaringly shoddy arguments made by prominent scholars, particularly when in came to this issue of the origins of human warfare. It's really pretty dispiriting to see ideology so brutally dominate critical thinking among people who pride themselves on their critical faculties.

To be fair, I'm sure some readers will accuse us of the same sorts of oversights, but if they're right, I guarantee you won't find me citing the same disproven statistics five years later!

Bella: You have a lot to say in Sex at Dawn about humans as highly sexual creatures with a fondness for a variety of sexual experiences and partners. But do you think that sexual interest is like so many other human characteristics in that it is variable? Maybe there is a typical interest in sex and in sexual variety (and I think you are telling us that these averages are higher than we have been led to believe), but isn't there also a range, such that some people are much less interested than others while some are even more interested? (I'm describing some sort of bell curve, for those who are familiar with the jargon.)

Christopher Ryan: Yes, you're certainly right that any discussion of human sexual response has to assume a great degree of variability, both between individuals and within individuals–especially women. A woman's feelings and attitudes toward sex are [continue reading here]

Bella: Have you heard from any of the people you critiqued?

Christopher Ryan: No, not since the book was published. Before publication, we sent relevant chapters to Frans de Waal and Helen Fisher, to give them a chance to point out any errors they found or to make the case that we were being unfair in some way. [continue reading here]

Bella: Now that the book has been out for a while and you've had people buzzing about it (here is where I mention that Sex at Dawn has been on the NY Times Bestseller list and that I'm very envious), is there anything you would add or rewrite if you could?

Christopher Ryan: That's another excellent question, which nobody has asked until now. I guess that's the kind of question one writer asks another! At the end of the book, we added a short “What Now?” section where we tried to very briefly show how some of the information presented in the book might be applied to contemporary marital problems. This was something of an afterthought, as the original manuscript ended without this material. Our editor and others thought it important to at least offer some minimal prescriptive discussion, so we agreed to address the typical husband-gets-caught-cheating scenario. More than a few readers have written to tell us that this feels imbalanced [continue reading here]

Bella: OK, now I'm going to whine about my big disappointment. I really didn't see it coming. (I'm going to need to build up to my point here, so please be patient.) I had loved how, through most of the book, you shot down the supposed superiority of the nuclear family. I especially appreciated your pointing out that children may have an advantage when more than two adults take an interest in them and have an important place in their lives.

When I researched Singled Out, I read research reports by sociologists such as Rosanna Hertz and Faith Ferguson who studied single mothers intensively. They found that far from raising their children single-handedly, single mothers were part of a whole ensemble of friends, relatives, and neighbors who helped one another and the children. I looked closely at lots of studies comparing the outcomes of children raised by single parents to those of children in married-parent homes. I found that many of the dire proclamations about the fate of the children of single and divorced parents were greatly exaggerated or just plain wrong.

I continued to read the literature on children of single parents, and I've discussed it on my blogs (here and here and here). I made fun of Caitlin Flangan for her Time magazine story in which she peddles all those silly myths and scare stories. I thought for sure that from you, I'd hear about the studies showing that in some cultures, children of single parents actually do as well or better in some important ways than children of married parents – probably because extended family members step in to help.

So perhaps you can now understand how appalled I was to find you repeating those claims about how children of single parents are doomed, and using as your source, not a scholar, but Caitlin Flanagan! Please say “uncle.”

Christopher Ryan: Uncle! I defer to your expertise in this literature. But (You knew there'd be a “but” right?) in our defense, I would say that our main point is that American society is especially hard on single parents and their children. I have no doubt that many single parents do an amazing job, but let's face it, they're climbing a steep hill to pull it off. Here in Spain, where I live, you see extended families pitching in all the time, as most people live close to their parents and grandparents, so there's a free baby-sitting service always available. But in the States, women are often left without this sort of help from extended family and the amount and quality of public support for mothers and their children in the States is, frankly, shameful. I used to work with homeless kids in San Francisco. I saw first-hand how difficult life was for single mothers trying to make a good life for their kids. It takes a village, but there was no village supporting these women. Unless they were out-and-out destitute, they got little or no help from the government. In a highly mobile society like America, where families are often spread all over the place, and government doesn't pitch in to help, single mothers and their kids are in a very vulnerable position. So I think we agree that single parents deserve our respect and support, rather than criticism.

In addition to contributing to the Huffington Post, Christopher Ryan also blogs at Psychology Today. To learn more about him and his new book, check out this website.

Material from:cnewblog.ru

A look at great reads from the editor of the TLS. This week: the letters of British poet Louis MacNeice, a reconsideration of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as victim and symbol, and the Berkshire volume in the famous Pevsner series.

Louis MacNeice and His Friends

Selected Letters of Louis MacNeice Edited by Jonathan Allison 816 pages. Faber and Faber. £35.
“MacSpaunday” was the dismissive nickname once given to the seemingly interchangeable poets of the 1930s: Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis. This oft-repeated jibe becomes more misleading than ever after the publication of the letters of Louis MacNeice. “So much for MacSpaunday,” writes David Wheatley in the TLS this week, noting that there are no letters in the 768-page collection to Spender or Day-Lewis and only one from Auden.

Are we to be pleased by this? Even to those who have long rejected the idea of conglomerate British left-wing poetry, so complete an absence of key correspondents gives that section of the book “a breathless, jittery feel,” Wheatley concludes. An unusual amount of the new book is devoted to MacNeice’s schooldays, during which he shared a room with the future art critic and Soviet agent Anthony Blunt while joining in debates on whether Keats deserved to be called a poet. Later subjects included rugby, alcohol, and the emotional and political backdrops to his own poetry. In his later years, “the pace of both MacNeice’s drinking and romantic entanglements picked up considerably,” enlivening the narrative without hugely enhancing our appreciation of the poet's achievements.

A Subversive Poet

The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Edited by Sandra Donaldson 2976 pages. Pickering & Chatto. £450.
The one romantic entanglement of Elizabeth Barrett Browning strongly influenced the reputation of her poetry—and did so much for the worse. Joseph Phelan in the TLS this week contrasts the 19th-century obsession with her martyrdom and victimhood with “the first modern scholarly edition” of her poetry that emphasizes her role as an edgy, subversive visionary.

This clash of sensibilities, between readers who were keen to see in Elizabeth’s poetry stereotypically feminine qualities of sentiment and pathos and modern critics determined to construct an “iconoclastic” and radical poet, is played out repeatedly. She is, on the one hand, the poet of the politically explosive “Curse for a Nation,” rushing “into drawing rooms and the like” with an unsettling message of social and sexual inequality. She is also the poet of “painfulness and martyrdom,” a pious, ascetic, and often rather unattractively dogmatic writer, who found a grim satisfaction in abasing herself before a succession of real and imaginary father figures. Phelan notes a powerful fragment on the rights of women, influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft and written when she was only 16. But no modernity of approach can save her from the occasional line such as “I aspire while I expire.”

Pevsner’s Berkshire

The Buildings of England: Berkshire By Geoffrey Tyrack, Nicolaus Pevsner, and Simon Bradley 800 pages. Yale University Press. $85.
Pevsner’s The Buildings of England is a classic in the process of a complete modernization. The highlight of the new edition of the volume of that is devoted to Berkshire is a “brilliant and intricate account of Windsor Castle, the greatest inhabited castle in England or anywhere for all I know,” writes Ferdinand Mount. Berkshire is a small county with “no ancient cathedral and few great houses.” But it includes miles of Thameside made famous by the animal homes of The Wind in the Willows and a 110-foot Gothic tower, built by the composer Lord Berners at Faringdon in the “high camp” spirit of his better known pink-and-blue-painted pigeons. This latter is “perhaps the last great folly built in England,” a wonder of a sort even if it must now share the county with the post-war suburban sprawl of Reading and Bracknell.

Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

Peter Stothard's latest book is On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy. He is also the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.

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Welcome to the new music week. This one is full of '70s flashbacks. Sheryl Crow tries to convince us that she's a '70s Southern soul singer, Marc Cohn channels his inner Cat Stevens, Big Head Todd & the Monsters make us believe we're still living out of a 1970s VW van, and rapper Rick Ross lays down some tracks that feel like the great '70s soul sides… until you hear the lyrics. Ouch. I don't remember the '70s like that.

SKIP: Sheryl Crow, “100 Miles From Memphis”

Sheryl Crow wants you to know she digs soul music. She's all about peace and love and keeping it groovy in a '70s, “Superfly” kinda way. She's recruited Southern soul musicians and producers Doyle Bramhall II and Justin Stanley to convince you. She's written new songs with funky '70s horn lines to convince you. She covers Terrence Trent D'Arby's supremely soulful (if not '70s) song “Sign Your Name” with Justin Timberlake to convince you. She covers the Jackson 5's “I Want You Back” to close the deal. Listen to the tracks, and you'll swear you've grown a 'fro and are waiting for your bell-bottoms to come back from the cleaners. Put Crow's voice into the middle, and something goes wrong. Sheryl Crow is a great singer; she's just not a soul singer. And this album needs a soul singer. It pains me to say it, because I wanted to play this all summer.

WATCH the music video for Sheryl Crow's single “Summer Day.”

SKIP: March Cohn, “Listening Booth: 1970″

Forever caught in the shadow of his 1991 hit “Walking in Memphis,” Marc Cohn's new album (only his fifth in a 20-plus-year career) goes for covers instead of originals. As Cohn explains it, he spent his misspent '70s youth in a local record store, previewing new albums in a listening booth. Now the husky-voiced singer and his producer, John Leventhal, have deconstructed the songbooks of Paul Simon, John Lennon, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, and eight other coffee-house classics. The problem? It's kind of a bore. Tempos slow to a crawl, and the volume rarely goes above a whisper. It's all very tasteful, but I wish they'd spent the time writing some new songs. Pick up some old vinyl if you want to recapture 1970.

WATCH Marc Cohn and John Leventhal discuss making “Listening Booth: 1970.”

PLAY: The Books, “The Way Out”

The New York duo return with their first full-length album since 2005's “Lost and Safe.” Vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong don't record songs as much as they throw sounds against the wall. “The Way Out” plays more like an audio sequel to “Blue Velvet” than it does a collection of tunes. Every track is a twisted tour through another private room where you're eavesdropping on someone's sordid secrets. The album is not easily ignored nor understood, and you may indeed be looking for the way out before it's over. Still, it's compelling as all hell and will give me something to tell my shrink at my next session.

WATCH the music video for the Books' song “A Cold Freezin' Night” .

PLAY: Big Head Todd & the Monsters, “Rocksteady”

Twenty-four years on, Big Head Todd & the Monsters are still super-jammy. While such contemporaries as Dave Matthews Band have shot into the mainstream stratosphere, BHTM play to a smaller but loyal legion of followers who dig their reliable, mid-tempo, laid-back grooves. “Rocksteady” doesn't mess with the formula, save for an appropriately dirty cover of Howlin' Wolf's “Smokestack Lightnin'.” Otherwise, it's sweet hippie bliss. Play it if you're a believer or if you have some patchouli and tie-dye you need to wear.

WATCH Big Head Todd & the Monsters perform the single “Beautiful.”

PLAY: Rick Ross, “Teflon Don”

The formula is simple: Rick Ross recruits Jay Z, Kanye West, Raphael Saadiq, Erykah Badu, Ne Yo, John Legend, and nearly every other hip-hip/neo-soul superstar to bring forth the rhythm and the rhyme. The rhythm is undeniably booty-quaking. You will move despite yourself. The rhyme, on the hand, is a baser affair: the usual two-dimensional playbook about n***as, b****hes, and the joys of telling people to f-off. What's a guy to do when his body wants to groove, but his mind wants to move beyond tired misogynistic hip-hop grandstanding? I guess that's why God invented the Roots. Play the music. Skip the rhymes.

WATCH the music video for Rick Ross' single “Super High.”

We’ve been following MP3Tunes, an online music locker, since it launched in late 2005. It’s come a long way since then. Today the service has 500,000 users, and has released a variety of new products to help those users get access to their music from almost any Internet connected device.

The core of the service is a music locker. It finds music on your hard drive and then backs it up online over a period of days. You can then log in and stream that music from a browser.

But the service is a lot more interesting than that. It will also sync your music across devices, making sure, for example, that iTunes has the same song library on each of your computers. It will also grab those iTunes playlists and make them available elsewhere as well.

They’ve recently inked a deal with Roku and are in beta. MP3Tunes users can stream music that they previously only had on their hard drive through their television on the Roku device. Logitech has also built MP3Tunes into a variety of devices, including this Wifi Internet radio. More devices are coming shortly, says MP3Tunes.

But the best part of MP3Tunes are the mobile apps. The Android application in particular is extremely useful. If you buy a song on the Android via the built in Amazon store, for example, you can easily upload that song quickly to MP3Tunes, and then have it available on, say your iPhone or iPod touch (as well as your desktop and everywhere else). MP3Tunes is calling the syncing behavior behind these application “Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere” – see the video below:

A number of other third parties have built MP3Tunes into their software and devices as well via a robust open API. I’m a big fan of music services on my mobile devices since getting actual song files onto the device is usually cumbersome and requires at least a purchase or a tethering. I use MOG on my android device and am quite happy with it.

But I also like the idea of just having access to my entire music collection – all 60 GB of it – on any device at any time. I’m a long time user of MP3Tunes, and I’ve recently upgraded from the free version to the 100 GB of storage.

Soon we’ll all have a variety of music streaming services to choose from – from Apple and Google’s upcoming products to the MOGs and Spotifys of the world. But all will likely have a hefty monthly subscription fee of $10/month or so for any kind of mobile access. I already have my core music collection on my hard drive, bought and paid for (for the most part). I really don’t see a need to pay $120/year to keep paying for that music. MP3Tunes gives me a viable reason to keep just buying music outright and downloading it.

All this assume, of course, that MP3Tunes wins the longstanding EMI Group lawsuit against them. In the meantime, though, I like the service.

MP3Tunes is free for 2 GB of storage. They are moving to 10 GB free in the near term, and 50 GB is $40/year. 25% of active users upgrade to a paid version, says the company.

Article from: Organic Tea Wholesale

Material from:laksy.ru

WASHINGTON — Minority children have fewer opportunities than their white peers to gain access to high-quality health care, education, safe neighborhoods and adequate support from the communities where they live, according to a nationwide survey of professionals who work with young people.

Of the professionals surveyed, 59 percent said young white children in their communities have “lots of opportunity” to play in violence-free homes and neighborhoods, while only 36 percent said the same about Hispanic children, 37 percent about African-American children and 42 percent about Native American children.

The survey refers to young children as 8 and under.

Fifty-five percent of respondents viewed young white children as having good access to high-quality health care, while 41 percent said the same of Hispanic, Arab American and American Indian/Alaska Native children and 45 percent said the same for African-American and Asian-American/Pacific Islander children.

The survey shows that children of all ages from low-income families, regardless of race, are at a greater disadvantage, in the view of the professionals who work with them.

The Kellogg Foundation survey, conducted in April, was set for release on Thursday. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the findings, which Kellogg said is the first known national assessment of health, educational and economic opportunities for minority children by adults who work with them at the community level.

Researchers with C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan conducted the poll of 2,028 adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia who work as teachers, childcare providers, health care workers, social workers and law enforcement officials.

Whites made up 71 percent of the poll's respondents, African-Americans 12 percent, Hispanics 7 percent, Asian-American/Pacific Islanders 3 percent, and other racial or ethnic groups the rest. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Gail Christopher, a Kellogg Foundation vice president, said those in jobs engaging children can more easily see the disparities between whites and minorities and can offer a closer look into the results of racism: communities with unequal systems of income and services.

Business Columnist Yells at Children Giving Lemonade Away for Free

Some little girls have recently been caught spitting on capitalism, by giving away lemonade from their sidewalk stand. For free! Where's the respect for suggested retail pricing? Fortunately, financial columnist Terry Savage drove by these children and yelled at them.

Savage was stunned to see these three little girls in an “upscale neighborhood” not learning how to manage their family's wealth at even this early age:

Last week, I was in a car with my brother and his fiancee, driving through their upscale neighborhood on a hot summer day. At the corner, we all noticed three little girls sitting at a homemade lemonade stand.

The three young girls — under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them — explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.

Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

“Oh, no,” they replied in unison, “they're all free!”

I sat in the back seat in shock.

Those little monsters! Time to learn them:

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

Or you give things away to charity, when you're rich.

Or you just don't harass little kids giving lemonade away on the sidewalk, as a rule of thumb.

[Image via Shutterstock.com]

Send an email to Jim Newell, the author of this post, at newell@gawker.com.

On February 27, 2009, Tapey, a Kirti monk, set himself on fire after a religious ceremony was cancelled by the Chinese authorities at his monastery in Tibet. He survived but may still be imprisoned. His protest followed a year of crackdown after major protests by monks.

Just before he was detained, well-known Tibetan essayist and editor Shogdung had visited his family outside Xining in Qinghai province where he lives. While there, he went into the mountains to make a traditional Tibetan offering, throwing 'windhorses' – prayers printed on small scraps of paper – into the sky. It was a ritual that Shogdung, a 47-year old civil servant who works for the Qinghai Nationalities Publishing House, would previously have opposed, on the grounds that such traditions are ultimately damaging to Tibetan efforts at modernizing their culture.

But that was before March, 2008, and the 'Spring protests' against the Chinese government that swept across the entire Tibetan plateau, involving every sector of society, from nomads, farmers and businesspeople to schoolchildren, teachers, and artists.

Shogdung, whose views were previously seen by many Tibetans as being close to those of the Communist Party, came to believe that this upsurge in dissent and solidarity is a new awakening for the Tibetan people and a rediscovery of pride in their identity as Tibetans. His writings about the 'peaceful revolution' since March, 2008 are among the most far-reaching indictments of Chinese policy in Tibet for 50 years. They are also likely to have been the reason why Chinese security police descended on his office on April 23, seized his books and two computers, and took him to prison.

For the first time since the Cultural Revolution, writers, intellectuals, singers and artists in Tibet are being systematically targeted for their work, and almost every expression of Tibetan identity can be accused of being 'reactionary' or 'splittist'. A popular singer from Amdo (now Qinghai), Tashi Dhondup, is in a labor camp as a result of singing songs referring to Tibetans' grief at the killings in March, 2008. The founder of a Tibetan website promoting Tibetan culture, Kunchok Tsephel, was sentenced in November to 15 years in prison. Bloggers, artists and other intellectuals, including an artist who taught the Tibetan language to nomad children, have 'disappeared'. A Tibetan author who interviewed elders about their experiences in the 1950s has lost his mind after torture in detention.

Despite, and also because of, the severity of the clampdown since the protests began, dissent continues to be expressed, particularly through the written word. As Tibet's best-known writer and poet Woeser says, Tibetans are attempting to transcend the terror by writing about it. They are daring to refute China's official narrative, presenting a more complex challenge to the Communist Party than before.

Shogdung is one of a new generation of educated Tibetans at the forefront of a literary and cultural resurgence in Tibet. This new bicultural, bilingual generation is fluent in Chinese as well as Tibetan, and familiar with digital technology. Although less well-known outside than high-profile Chinese dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia, Shogdung and other Tibetan writers and bloggers detained over the past two years are famous among Tibetans, and their concerns about repression and restrictions by the state mirror those of their Chinese counterparts. This is a development of immeasurable significance to Tibet's future – and as educated Chinese build new alliances with their Tibetan counterparts – to China's.

While loyalty to the Dalai Lama remains undiminished, often this new generation of Tibetan intellectuals is secular in background and politically moderate. Many support the Dalai Lama's 'Middle Way' approach for a genuine autonomy under Chinese sovereignty. In one collection of writings, Eastern Snow Mountain – banned as soon as it was published in Tibet in 2008 – essayists from Amdo in eastern Tibet demonstrate extensive knowledge of Chinese and Tibetan law and policy, and discuss the sufferings of ordinary Chinese people as well as their own struggles against the state.

Tashi Rabten, one of the editors of the magazine, a thoughtful, determined young student at Northwest Nationalities University in Lanzhou, was detained on April 7, his room ransacked, and his current whereabouts is unknown. In Eastern Snow Mountain, he writes that the essays were published “as a sketch of history written in the blood of a generation.” (English translation in A Great Mountain Burned by Fire: China's Crackdown in Tibet)

Since March 2008, the Chinese government has engaged in a systematic attempt to block news of the arrests, torture, disappearances and killings that have taken place across Tibet. As part of this rigorous approach, the Chinese authorities launched a campaign in Tibet not only against 'spreading rumors' – a term typically used to refer to dissenting views and sentiment in the PRC – but also against listening to them. One Tibetan woman, Norzin Wangmo, is serving a five-year sentence simply for talking about the situation in Tibet on the phone.

Beijing has also tightened control of the internet. In an announcement typical in its opacity, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang said recently: “The Chinese Government manages the Internet according to the law. As for what you can and cannot watch, watch what you can watch, and don't watch what you cannot watch.”

In China, as one writer observed, there is a red line between what can be said and what cannot. But you do not know where the line is until you've crossed it.

Tibetan writer Shogdung, the most high-profile writer to be detained in the current crackdown, knew he had crossed the line when he published his book, The Line between Sky and Earth. That's why he went to visit his elderly father and to pray in the mountains. His family does not know where he is, and no one knows how long he will be held. But his book, published without an ISBN number, is now a word of mouth bestseller, circulating underground, his written words about the 'peaceful revolution' now reaching Tibetans in exile all well as across Tibet.

Details of more than 50 writers, artists and intellectuals who have been imprisoned, 'disappeared' or suffered harassment for their work at: http://http://www.savetibet.org/

High Peaks, Pure Earth: translations from Tibetan blogs and new writing http://highpeakspureearth.com

Like Gold that Fears no Fire: New Writing from Tibet http://www.savetibet.org/media-center/ict-news-reports/gold-fears-no-fire-new-writing-tibet

Disney/Marvel has already announced that it plans to mine its properties for some lesser-known characters to adapt to film. Over at Warners/DC, with Superman and Batman projects already in the works, it looks like The Flash might their next major superhero project. Although The Flash has had several aborted starts in the past, Berlanti was recently rumored to be one of the front-runners for the director’s chair.

Heat Vision posits that this has a great deal to do with the fact that Geoff Johns is now the chief creative officer at DC Entertainment. Johns was responsible for the 2009 series The Flash: Rebirth. It is believed that the new Flash film would be based on the Barry Allen incarnation of The Flash (also the one that Johns uses). Since Allen and Hal Jordan (AKA The Green Lantern) are known to be friends in the comics, the potential for crossover could be significant. Thus, if Green Lantern is a hit in the way that Warners is hoping, it could be the start of more than one franchise.

My search has to this point been frustrated by the profusion of competing editions. The one I have in mind, anyway, which is to say the one I remember from my youth, is a picture book or a children's book with intricate full-page color illustrations of Tampa Town, the projectile's interior, and the actual firing, as well as amusing grotesques of members of the Baltimore Gun Club, with their missing limbs and jaws and so on. It's not formatted like a comic book, though I believe there're more pictures than text. I'm not sure whether it's called "From the Earth to the Moon" or "A Trip to the Moon and Around it" or something else.

Evangeline Lilly Writing Children’s Book!

Friday June 4, 2010

EVANGELINE Lilly is writing a children’s book.

The 30-year-old actress is planning to carve out a career as an author now she has more time on her hands since the ending of her TV series Lost.

“I love to write,” she said. “I write everything across the board — kids stories and novels and scripts.

“I actually would like to give that a go; I’d like to try to be a writer.”

When quizzed on her literary endeavours by US TV talk show host Craig Ferguson, the brunette beauty currently revealed she is working on a children’s novel called The Squickerwonkers and went on to recite seven lines of the text from memory.

The extract ended with “There’s a secret that lies behind the Squickerwonkers’ name, a horrible secret that give Squickerwonkers shame.”

However, Evangeline refused to reveal the “horrible secret” behind the as-yet unpublished tale.

She teased, “You have to read the book to find out!”

The actress recently revealed the ending of Lost has left her “homeless and unemployed”.

“I did live in Hawaii where we filmed and now I am essentially homeless. I’m a gypsy a bit, living out of my suitcase, and I’m unemployed,” she said last month.

“I was filling out a form at the dentist the other day and I realised when they said ‘Put your address and your occupation’ that I was homeless and unemployed.”

A couple years ago I was helping renovate a house in New Orleans and I came across a children's book lying around that I really liked. I was sure I would remember the title, but of course I didn't, and now that I really want to find it, I feel like one of those people who come to Barnes & Noble to buy "East of Eden" and know only the color of the book & that it is a book.

Here is what I (think I) know, in descending order of certainty: The book is about an African-American girl, between 8 and 13 years old, in an urban neighborhood. It's an oversized hardback, and each page is covered with art, with only about a sentence or two of text per page. The girl lives with just her mother (or possibly grandmother, but pretty sure it's her mother). From what I remember about the types of buildings in her neighborhood, it might be Harlem, or somewhere else in New York City, though I don't think a real-world place is ever explicitly mentioned. The art style has lots of rusty reds and browns, and not much detail; the landscapes and people could theoretically be assembled out of construction paper. I feel like the characters may not have even had faces.

The book is relatively plotless and minimalistic. The girl lives with her mom and enjoys being part of her community. There may have been some kind of conceit, and I remember a very strong and subtle melancholy subtext, but I don't remember what could possibly have been the source of it, or whether it was even from the book or my own state of mind at the time.

The biggest detail I can remember is that there was something in the book about the windows in the girl's mother's house. For a long time, before I tried Googling it, I was actually convinced the title of the book was "No Windows in My Mama's House" – but there's no such book, and I have no clue what that phrase could be suggesting in the context of what I remember of the plot.

If anyone can figure out what on earth I'm talking about, holy crap, I will personally hew you a mighty limestone shrine from the very fundament of the Earth using only my toenails and a dental pick.

Lost looker Evangeline Lilly dropped by Craig Ferguson’s couch last night for some after-hours chit chat. And after covering a few non-kid-friendly topics (Ferguson’s snake-shape mug, the potential removability of Lilly’s dress, etc.), she shifted gears to give a sneak peek of a children’s book she’s writing called Squickerwonkers (we’re guessing at the spelling there). Here’s a sample:

“The name is Squickerwonker, perhaps unknown to you. But that’s it, Squickerwonker. And here’s what Squickerwonkers do…”

Of course, Lilly didn’t spend six years on that island for nothing: She ends her little recitation with a Lost-worthy cliffhanger about the Squickerwonker’s “horrible secret.”

Are they actually smoke monsters? Or maybe they exist in an alternate universe? Lilly says she doesn’t have any firm publishing plans yet for the book, so I guess we’ll all just have to hang in there for a while. But you know what? The whole thing actually sounds kind of cute.  We’d totally pre-order a copy for ourselves our appropriately aged cousins next Christmas.

What do you think PopWatchers? Check out the clip below and then let us know: should Lilly take a crack at children’s book writing?