Martin Peretz’s excellent piece in this week’s New Republic deserves more notice. Peretz has always been a big supporter of Al Gore, and he came under some fire over the past couple of years for using his magazine to boost Gore during the presidential campaign. Indeed, to the point of firing at least one editor… Continue reading

Are DVDs the wave of the future for independent filmmakers? Chris Gore at Filmthreat thinks so. And his piece in the newsletter this week is worth quoting in depth: Independent film is currently at a crossroads. The former titans of the indie film world, the Miramaxes and the Artisans, have all but stopped taking risks.… Continue reading

John Ellis has a great piece touting netflix.com, one of the true success stories of the over-hyped dot.com era. Meanwhile at The New Republic, John Judis explains why Major League baseball won’t be much better off, even if the Players and Owners avoid a strike this Friday….

University of Rochester biologist H. Allen Orr does a good job exposing the nonsense in the latest publication from the never-never land of those humorless conservatives who believe in “Intelligent Design.” (presumably there being such a thing as stupid design?) Question:Do reasonable liberals get annoyed by the fringe types on their end of the spectrum… Continue reading

The Word from New York: On the publishing front, as my inside contact tells me, the picture is getting grimmer for fiction writers. More and more scribes, even those working within the industry, according to this veteran editor, are turning to the new publishing models and technologies to bring out their work, as it gets… Continue reading