Musings
Next Entries »Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America
Thursday, July 12th, 2007This recently released book by Daniel Brook (who shares my agent Larry Weissman) is a provocative look at how a winner-takes-all society sucks the best and the brighest away from public interest fields that can better society. Rick Perlstein gives a thoughtful analysis of the book. Daniel will be doing a reading on Monday Jan […]
So, when is a font racist?
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007So today, I got a burst of traffic from a link from AngryAsianMan, a popular and well-regarded blog on Asian American issues. From that traffic, I got the following feedback comment on the chingchongy font that “THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES” is written in along the top of the blog, which I found intriguing. Angry Asian […]
Nicholas Kulish: Last One In is Finally Out!
Friday, June 29th, 2007Nick Kulish’s satirical take on the Iraq invasion, Last One In, is out this month from the Ecco imprint of Harper Collins. It trails a Page-Sixish type tabloid gossip reporter for The New York Daily Herald as he gets embedded. (Kulish himself was actually embedded for the 2003 invasion for The Wall Street Journal). I […]
Breathing easier. The manuscript does not suck.
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007I got an e-mail from my editor, Jon Karp, which was a great relief. It looks like the book revisions are not going to take too long, and are not going to be too much of a structural overhaul, which means we can get it to the copyeditors by August 1 (which is apparently key […]
WSJ: Atheism, the new readers’ market
Monday, June 25th, 2007Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal writes about the surprising success of Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (Twelve, 2007). Twelve originally printed a modest 40,000 copies. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry […]
I <3 flickr wordpress widgets
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007I just installed Josh Gerdes’ SimpleFlickr Plugin to display Chinese restaurant photos from Flickr and it was breathtakingly easy. When I saw the line of code I was suppose to drop into the page, I thought, “Is that it? That can’t be it.” It took maybe 10 minutes and it comes back with this beautiful […]
Facebook: “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.”
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007So people in my age group have only recently gotten into Facebook (we were the Friendster generation, though I am proud to say I have a very low ID on Facebook, but never got into it since no one else I knew was in it back then). My  favorite Facebook group of all time is […]
The chopsticks are no worse than a tattoo
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007My friend quickly threw together a temporary header for the blog (displacing boats, tomatoes and puppies that came with WordPress templates), asking “is it obvious that i had to mirror the chopsticks?” Um, yes. If you look closely, you’ll see the Chinese characters on the chopsticks are backwards. But it doesn’t matter since most of the […]
If you blog in an empty forest, will anyone hear you?
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007(I wrote this post two nights ago and I guess it’s now irrelevant. I feel like this blog is like a baby born prematurely — you have to work a bit harder a bit earlier than expected, but it will all be okay in the end):  I set up this web site a few days ago […]
Newspapers: relying on deep thoughts as much as Deep Throat?
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007David Folkenflik has an NPR piece today about media depending on “conceptual scoops” — which is akin to what I call “stories that people talk about” (aka the most-emailed stories, aka, the secret weapon that newspapers will (hopefully) ultimately wield in a hyperconnected, hypermemed, hyperblogged digital media age). He interviews Phil Bennett, managing editor of The Washington, Post, who […]
Two for two for Twelve on the NYT bestseller list
Sunday, June 17th, 2007Â New York Magazine has an item by Lloyd Grove on Twelve’s early success with landing the imprint’s first two books on The New York Times best seller list — Boomsday by Christopher Buckley (peaked at #14 on the fiction hardcover bestseller list) and God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens (#1 on non-fiction hardover). […]
Did you change the margins on your term paper too?
Thursday, June 14th, 2007I was contracted at 90,000 words, and it looked like I was heading to 110,000. Journalists are obsessed with length/word count (Book editors tell me that their journalist authors will always know exactly how many words they have written so far. Was true for me!) It seemed to me 20% overage was severe, so the […]
My book cover: Orange is the New Orange
Thursday, June 14th, 2007So here it is: my orange orange cover. It’s what I call Gates-of-Central-Park orange, which is admittedly eye-catching and “in” right now. A lot of people have complained about the “cognitive dissonance” of “fortune cookie” on a soy sauce packet (which isn’t cognitive dissonance at all per psychology definitions, but rather “incongruity”). There are no […]
Whatever happened to The Long March of General Tso?
Thursday, June 14th, 2007If you are here, you will notice that my book on Chinese food is no longer called The Long March of General Tso, as reported previously. Many people are sad about this, I among them. This brilliant title was conceived by my colleague Michael Luo. But the logic by my editor was this: If you […]
I’m 34% off!
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007V.V. Ganeshananthan (whom we call Sugi) pointed out to me a few weeks ago that my book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, was already on sale on Amazon (if you buy by clicking through that link, I get like 4% commission) — which shocked me as I had not turned even turned in my manuscript. I […]
Dreamhost, WordPress and MySQL
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007Okay. I just registered for hosting at Dreamhost and installed WordPress. And indeed, as my friend promised, it was one-click installation + typing in some fields. I had a little stumble with trying to figure out a good nomenclature for the mysql database, as ‘wordpress’ and ‘blog’ (recommended) were being used elsewhere in the Dreamhost […]
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