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My unglamorous self

The Hartford Courant ran a piece about me today. I have yet to purchase a newspaper, but my friend was kind enough to send me a photo of the story as it appears in the paper. My favorite part of the piece is the photo of me writing at the table in all my unglamorous…

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The dead writing about the dead

The New York Times had their Elizabeth Taylor obituary ready for so long that the writer of the piece, Mel Gussow, has been dead for six years.

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US Weekly a mystery to me

This was the magazine cover that I was staring at yesterday while waiting in line at the supermarket. Here’s the good news: I did not recognize the woman on the front cover who was “obsessed with being thin” (though I suspect that she might not actually be a celebrity). I learned that someone named Kim…

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Snob magazine

When I heard that Snob magazine was hitting newsstands in December, I was thrilled. What better way to tell a person that he or she is an unlikeable, unjustifiable elitist than by sending them a subscription to Snob Magazine? I instantly had two or three recipients in mind. Of course, the one caveat would be…

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Trash

I was getting my haircut last week. and the usually bustling salon was relatively empty. Just me, the woman cutting my hair (not my regular stylist) and a customer on the other side of the salon, sitting with tinfoil in her hair. Halfway through the haircut, the tinfoil lady, People magazine in hand, asked my…

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Most popular at the the moment

One of the websites that I like best is the New York Times Most Popular page, where you can get links to the most emailed and most blogged stories from the Times, ranked in order.  I often find these lists quite telling in terms of defining the average reader of the Times as well as…

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Death of the American newspaper

Is there a person alive who doesn’t lament the possible death of the American newspaper? If so, then why is the American newspaper dying? If we are all so concerned with the loss of the hometown newspaper, why aren’t people actually purchasing the newspaper? This reminds me of our shabby treatment of the independent bookstore.…

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Life magazine for free!

Life magazine, 1935-1972, is now available online through Google Books. It joins Life magazine’s photo archive, also available courtesy of Google. I just spent an hour reading through issues from the 1940s and found the advertising to be most interesting. Sexist, straight-forward, scantily-clad, and almost always sentimental, it’s hard to imagine when magazine advertisements such…

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