Category: Economy
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Running in the shadows
An article from the NYT on the rise of teenaged runaways over the past few years, as the economy has worsened. It’s sad and, for me, recognizable. One of the things I encountered every now and then when I was going around reading from my first novel, One for Sorrow, after its release a couple…
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A small taste of America in decline
An interactive segmented video about my home region’s loss of industry over the past thirty years, and how it may now lose its very last major manufacturer in GM. It’s very well made, though a sad reality, and one that is now in the new century becoming the reality of more and more communities in…
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The Dreamer
Okay, okay, I babble on about my home city–small, cranky and rusty as it is, I love it, as a person should love and care for anything they feel is theirs in some way, as a home is–but sometimes I fall silent about it on my blog for long periods because even I get sick…
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Out of this furnace
I’ve been reading a novel called “Out of this Furnace” for one of my summer courses. It’s by Thomas Bell, an author from Braddock, Pennsylvania who grew up in a steel mill family. The novel is semi-autobiographical, following three generations of a Slovak immigrant family from the turn of the century through the thirties. The…
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Long live art
A really interesting article about the changes in the art world over the past decade or two, mirroring the movement away from global awareness that multiculturalism had been brewing in the late 80s to 90s as the country moved politically towards greater conservatism, and how that has, in the end, handicapped American art as it…
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Lincoln Avenue
Sherry Linkon, of Youngstown State University, has one of the most illuminating radio shows in town, Lincoln Avenue, named both for the street on which our local NPR station is located as well as a play on her last name. Last week she interviewed Marilyn Geewax, senior business editor for National Public Radio, who also happens…
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Q&A
I’ve been spending the past week doing Q&A at the Endicott Mythic Reader’s Group on Goodreads, and there have been some really thoughtful questions. One came in today, to which I just responded. And I’ve decided to post the question and my response here, too. Q: Ghosts and eldritch kids in and of themselves aren’t…
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Books in recession
Reading this article in the NYT about the woes of the book publishing industry not being able to make as much money off of their product due to the rise of online used booksellers seems very similar to what happened in the music industry when Napster arrived and people started sharing music instead of buying…
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Doing the math
Do you get sick and tired of hearing how Republicans apparently are better with the economy, with money, than Democrats, and how Democrats are perceived to be “spend, spend, spend”? Well, if so, you need to read the fabulous Scott Westerfeld’s (author of the Uglies series) blog post “Do the Math” on the website YA…
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Making the news
The reporter from the Chicago Tribune that interviewed me did indeed end up writing a story that made use of a quote from me. However, the version with me quoted in it appears in the Kansas City Star, rather than the version in the Chicago Tribune, where the editor must have clipped it out.