The cost of textbooks has gone up twice the rate of inflation each year since the late 80s, says a new report. “The average annual cost of textbooks for a student in 2003-04 was $898 at a four-year college and $886 at a two-year college, the report found. While overall prices have increased 72 percent since 1986, the report said, college tuition and fees have increased 240 percent and textbooks 186 percent.”
Tag: 08.17.05
Deffending Your Life
You’re writing an autobiography. You’re writing about people around you. But some of it might not be flattering. Indeed, some of it might be bizarre. So how much do you have to disguise your descriptions of these people, and will you be sued? These are the issues in a case brought against a best-selling memoir “Running With Scissors.” The book world is following it closely…
A Quarter Of Us Never Read Books
“For every four Britons with their noses in a bestseller, there’s one adult in the UK who does not read books at all. Research by the Office for National Statistics, commissioned by the National Reading Campaign in 2001, found a quarter of adults had not read a book in the previous 12 months. The figure rose to almost half among males aged 16-24. This is despite soaring book sales – up 19% in the UK in the five years to 2004. This rejection of books is not connected to literacy – the number of adults with reading difficulties has decreased by two million in the past decade to about five million.”
The Critical Temperament
Choire Sicha looks in on New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelmen’s new book on artists, and observes that “the mild-natured chief art critic of The New York Times, has been for a while now less a critic and more a hagiographer. He has seemed unwilling to use his position as a pulpit.”
Wynn – The Most Complex Manmade Structure Ever?
Vegas mogul Steve Wynn is irritated. Many critics didn’t greet the opening of his new $2.7 billion Wynn hotel casino with the kind of awe he expected. “Comparing a Vegas casino — each of which is likely to be imploded and rebuilt, by the next century anyway — to the world’s greatest and most enduring structures is an invitation to snickering, even if it might actually be true. But if others question whether his Trump-like hubris has brought him this backlash, Wynn himself wonders why few have asked him to explain the claim.”
Christie’s Reports Record Sales
Christie’s auction house reports record sales for the first six months of 2005. “Sales at Christie’s, which is owned by François Pinault, were $1.65bn in the six months to June – a third higher than last year. It sold 178 works of art for more than $1m, compared with 132 during the same period last year.”
Rethinking Your Movie Theatre Pleasure
Your movie theatre experience is about to get better. “At a time when movie attendance is flagging, when home entertainment is offering increasing competition and when the largest theater chains – Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment (which has recently announced a merger with Loews Cineplex) and Cinemark – are focused on shifting from film to digital projection, a handful of smaller companies with names like Muvico Theaters, Rave Motion Pictures and National Amusements are busy rethinking what it means to go to the movie theater.”
Colin Wilson: Optimistically Yours
“In books on sex, crime, psychology and the occult, and in more than a dozen novels, Colin Wilson has explored how pessimism can rob ordinary people of their powers. ‘If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it’s the feeling there’s something basically wrong with human beings. Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. Our powers appear to be taken away from us by something.’ The critics, particularly in Britain, have alternately called him a genius and a fool.”
Hadid – The Inventor Of 89 Degrees
Architect Zaha Hadid is finally getting her buildings built around the world. It took many years. “There is a certain uncompromising otherworldliness to Hadid. And this, combined with the wackiness of her designs, may account for why, for many years, she remained Britain’s great unbuilt architect. Many architects take a long time to come to the fore, but Hadid’s incubation period stretched for nearly 25 years.”