Neither Mallory nor I have read what she calls “the faulty stars book,” but a whole bunch of people feel really strongly about it, including my nieces, who are perfect and always right, so I found this piece very helpful:
Green is probably the first author also to post to Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube from the entire shoot, and since the backstory of The Fault in Our Stars is as canonical as the story itself, this is understandable, if unconventional. “All of my author friends are like — well, I remember the first time I tweeted a picture from the set, I got, like, 30 emails from all of my author friends: ‘You need to delete that immediately.’ I’m like, ‘No, they said I could do it,’” he says. “It’s allowed me to make the stuff I want to make for the Nerdfighters. It’s nice for them to feel like they’re part of it, because they do have special access to the movie, because they’re the reason we’re here. The readers of the book are the first people I want to make a good movie for.”
The heraldic issues of gay marriage have been sorted:
(2) A woman who contracts a same-sex marriage may bear arms on a shield or banner, impaling the arms of her wife with her own or (in cases where the other party is an heraldic heiress) placing the arms of her wife in pretence. The coat of arms of each party to the marriage will be distinguishable by the arms of the individual concerned being placed on the dexter side of the shield or banner (or displayed as the principal arms in cases where the other party is an heraldic heiress whose arms are borne in pretence). When one of the parties to the marriage dies, the survivor may bear the combined arms on a lozenge or banner.
Please enjoy a gross and informative piece on Chicago’s last tannery:
The processes for making Horween’s signature leathers like shell cordovan and Chromexcel, a rich and versatile cowhide, can’t be rushed. Shell cordovan comes from the inner membrane of the horse posterior. The horse butts are draped over rods and submerged in “pits,” or low pools filled with Horween’s proprietary vegetable tanning solution made from tree barks, for 30 days. After tanning, the hides are carefully shaved, a process that exposes the outline of the inner membrane, and steeped in a second pit of stronger solution for another 30 days. When they come out, they’re hand-oiled. Then, after a three-month rest, they have to be re-wet and shaved again on a machine whose blade is controlled with a foot pedal.
Matt Weiner did an interview with the Paris Review.
Kathryn Joyce is doing some of the best investigative journalism in the US right now, and this piece on GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) is no exception:
To survivors, that logic is clear. “GRACE is not hired by the weak, the self-protective, the blasphemous institutions who invoke the name of Jesus in their cover-ups,” says Kari Mikitson, founder of Fanda Eagles. “There are very few Christian organizations out there who want the truth at all costs. If you as an organization are not brave enough to retain GRACE when your survivors request them, then you are a disgrace. And you aren’t fooling anyone—you are hiding skeletons.”
What’s this? Oh, just the MOST BIZARRE puppet-related stuff ever, over at 50 Watts.
AHP on the celebrity profile:
The profile and its public-relations power were by no means limited to the Hollywood star, or even to the twentieth century. Historian Charles Ponce De Leon dates the emergence of personality journalism to the development of the “public sphere” in the late eighteenth century, when “virtually any man could be famous—could become a public figure known to a large number of people.” A man needn’t be a member of the aristocracy or even from a well-to-do family; he just needed to be public. He could be a writer or a politician, a captain of industry or an actor. But with public visibility came the need to manage that publicity—to author the public self, as it were. Thus: autobiographies, commissioned biographies, interviews. Think The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which, with its healthy dose of quips and bon mots, helped solidify Franklin’s reputation as both a politician and a Renaissance man.
