What my followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ saw today:
• The disdain for women from mainstream media is breathtaking. ‘The Bell Jar’ Cover Inspires Online Parodies
• Boiled down: “Instead of ensuring that everyone in America can compete in a global economy, instead of narrowing the divide between rich and poor, instead of supporting competitive free markets for American inventions that use information, instead that is of ensuring that America will lead the world in the U.S. in the information age, U.S. politicians have chosen to keep Comcast and its fellow giants happy.” Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair
• Signs point to No… Are filmgoers finally rejecting screen violence?
• TV news anchor doesn’t know Onion is fake, also doesn’t do rudimentary factchecking on Web site reporting what she thinks is outrageous news. Journalmalism! TV reporter discovers Onion stories are fake
• And now: A collection of postings from Facebook from people who don’t realize the Onion is parody news. Literally Unbelievable
I’m not sure if the problem with ”The Bell Jar” cover is about disdain for women-it looks more like disdain for, and complete ignorance of serious literature. You wonder if the designer of the ”real” cover has ever read the book, or has even the slightest idea who Sylvia Plath actually was.
My read on the Bell Jar cover is that someone thought “this is about a young woman struggling to cope with a job in the big city – obviously it’s chick lit”.
How many people even look at book covers these days?
I love those articles in which some reporter or columnist takes a few individual events that seem similar, which in no way constitute a statistically significant sample, and extrapolate a widespread social trend: “A few action movies released in January didn’t make much money. It must mean that American audiences are turning against violent movies!” Extra-special scientific illiteracy bonus points for the supposition that the correlation between the timing of this “trend” and the Newtown shootings implies that a reaction to the shootings caused this astonishing change in moviegoing behavior.