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Paul Collins

Paul Collins teaches writing at Portland State University, and his work appears regularly in New Scientist, Slate, and The Believer. His next book, The Murder of the Century, will be published in June by Crown.
  • Paul Collins

    Victorian Photoshop

    Check out the slideshow of Victorian photo-collage over at Slate…

  • Paul Collins

    Amazon Gets Up a Creek in California

    Last year I noted in Slate that Amazon’s been having it both ways for a while on state sales taxes — not paying any where they were not due, and not paying any even where they were due:

  • Paul Collins

    Bad Luck

    I find this Wikipedia category weirdly fascinating: List of Las Vegas Casinos That Never Opened. A sample:

  • Paul Collins

    Free Dreadfuls

    Terrific news in last Sunday’s Times of London: “MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring….Many of the downmarket books known as…

  • Paul Collins

    Is Borders Broke?

    Financial Times reported on Wednesday that small vendors are retaining counsel to make sure they get paid by Borders.

  • Paul Collins

    Alt Weakly

    For some reason this hasn’t attracted much notice nationally, but this last week the San Francisco Bay Guardian won a whopping $21 million dollar judgment against Village Voice Media for monopolistic practices by VVM-owned SF Weekly. But because VVM was…

  • Paul Collins

    If it’s too loud…

    NPR has a terrific piece this week on the Loudness War — as mourned/explained by this YouTube video. As a drummer, hearing every part of the kit and every single beat rammed to the front of mixes is as depressing…

  • Paul Collins

    Madmen Across the Water

    (Hildebrand chocolate card, c. 1900) I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a brief history of aquatic pedestrianism:

  • Paul Collins

    The Road to Cell

    I wrote a New Scientist piece earlier this year on the nearly criminal foot-dragging by Detroit over safety advances made by pioneering engineers in the 1950s and 60s, and that sad pattern seems to have been repeated… with cell phone…

  • Paul Collins

    Into the Vault

    I’m on a NPR Weekend Edition segment about Shakespeare’s First Folio this weekend; Scott Simon and I ventured into the vault of the Folger with library director Gail Paster. It’s very rare that they let anyone into the underground vault…

  • Paul Collins

    Paper Castles

    I love that a book like this needed to exist in the first place — an 1859 guide to creating architect’s models out of paper:

  • Paul Collins

    So I’m Guessing There’s No Second Edition

    A charming find on eBay: a 1927 guide on How to Play the Cinema Organ published at the exact moment that talkies were about to rub out the profession. The Jazz Singer came out in October of that very year.