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Paul Collins
48 posts
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.
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…
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…
Is Borders Broke?
Financial Times reported on Wednesday that small vendors are retaining counsel to make sure they get paid by Borders.
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…
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…
Madmen Across the Water
(Hildebrand chocolate card, c. 1900) I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a brief history of aquatic pedestrianism:
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…
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…
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:
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…