Posts tagged with money
Edible Economics, by Ha-Joon Chang
Ha-Joon Chang's Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World starts off strong. Chang is a well-regarded economist, his prose is simultaneously engaging and easy to follow, and I like the cover art concept (National flags! But made of food!) Unfortunately, the end result is slightly underwhelming—a tasty but thrown-together snack, rather than a well-balanced meal...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Edible Economics, by Ha-Joon Chang
WE LIVE (but the world is a weird place right now, so things will probably continue to be sporadic). Our current Book Giveaway is Ha-Joon Chang's Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World, installment #8,943 in our ongoing series, “Nonfiction Books Julia has Picked Up at Random”. A full review will follow shortly...
Holiday Gift Pick #4
Gift Idea #4: a used copy of Amy Dacyczyn's The Complete Tightwad Gazette
Well before the internet became a haven of frugality tips, Ms. Dacyczyn produced a newsletter that compiled...
If it works, it works
This is probably the most interesting article I've seen about Marie Kondo's work: an essay in Business Insider about using the KonMari method to get rid of credit card debt. The author takes Kondo's tidying-up tips and applies them to her financial life, and the whole thing...
Of course, they were adaptations to begin with, but still.
There's a fascinating article at The AV Club about an important fact that may be fueling Disney's current passion for live-action remakes of their classic animated films: Disney owns the scripts for those movies wholesale, so...
Bubbly on Your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis
For a book written in 1937, Marjorie Hillis's Bubbly on Your Budget has some surprisingly timely advice. Sure, the details might need to be adjusted for a 21st century lifestyle, but her basic message—that you should spend your money on what you actually value—is just as valid today as it was 80 years ago...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Bubbly On Your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis
In honor of this season of furious consumerism, this week's Book Giveaway is Marjorie Hillis's Bubbly on Your Budget, a reprint of a financial advice guide first published in 1937 under the title Orchids On Your Budget. This volume is used (and looks it), but still an unexpectedly modern and entertaining read. A full review will follow shortly...
Scrambling for cash
Chawton House Library, the “Great House” once owned by Jane Austen's brother Edward, is seeking to raise around £150,000 over the next 18 months to stay open after a longtime backer withdrew support. (The £150,000 is just to keep the doors open while they apply for millions in capital grants...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, by Michael Ruhlman
It's been a while, so it's time for one of our rare nonfiction reviews: this week's Book Giveaway is Michael Ruhlman's Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. (That's a biiiig subject for a short book, but whatever.) A full review will follow shortly...
Financial hijinks
Well, this is hinky. According to Publishers Weekly, the once-popular online e-book retailer AllRomanceEbooks shut down operations at the end of December. Unfortunately, there's a lot of mystery surrounding the whys and wherefores of this shut down...
She's already famous
And speaking of Jane Austen, we're finally getting a good look at the £10 notes featuring her likeness. I'm not sure about that color scheme (why so orange?), but...
Cleaning up
According to the BBC, the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child script is the fastest-selling book in the UK this decade. It sold more than 680,000 copies in the first three days after its release, beating the previous record held by IFifty Shades of Grey. (British book snobs can heave a sigh of relief.) At its current rate, the script will be...
Shocking
Forbes just posted an interesting article about how scandals affect book sales. (Short answer: negatively.) The article takes specific aim at Gay Talese's new work, The Voyeur’s Motel, which has been...
Dark Money, by Jane Mayer
On August 30, 2010, Janet Mayer published an article in the New Yorker called 'Covert Operations', an in-depth look at the political influence of Charles and David Koch, two American billionaire brothers who have devoted over a hundred million dollars to promoting libertarian causes. Over the next few years Mayer deepened and expanded her research on the subject, transforming her article into...
Scandalous!
I recently picked up a copy of Jane Mayer's nonfiction book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. I love books about financial scandals, and this one is even juicier when you take into account the contents of this New York Times article, which...
Real-world math
This is a little booknerd-specific, but there's an interesting article on InsideHigherEd about Alain Bourget, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University at Fullerton. Bourget recently received an official reprimand...
Sad facts
SplitSider writer Priyanka Mattoo recently wrote a helpful explanatory article called "How Does a Book Get Optioned and Become a Movie?" If, like me, you don't really care about the how-to stuff for writers looking to sell their book(s) to Hollywood, skip to the paragraph that..
One last attempt
According to THR, the US Supreme Court has declined to review a challenge to Warner Bros./DC Comics' claim to the rights to Superman...
A drop in the college-expenses bucket
NPR's Planet Money recently posted an article about the win some/lose some economics of college textbook publishing. The whole thing's worth a read (it's short), but in brief: the cost of textbooks has gone waaaaay up, but the number of textbooks people buy, and how much they pay for them, has gone waaaaay down...
Lifestyles of the rich and pseudonymous
The Washington Post featured an article on Monday about the financial woes confronting the best-selling erotica author known as "Zane". She apparently owes the IRS almost $541,000, despite being an extremely successful author and publisher, and has been publicly labeled Maryland’s...
So painful. Seriously.
Yet another day when I find myself wishing it was actually April 1st: according to The Independent, E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey is the best-selling British book of all time, beating out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...
In these troubled economic times, I know I should be grateful.
Washington State tourism: first boosted by the Twilight books, and now (apparently) by the dread Fifty Shades of Grey. WHY? Why can't people visit us because of their burning desire to trace the scenes in Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide, or Kat Richardson's Greywalker books...
Maybe a TV show...
According to the website GossipCop, Lionsgate Films would really like to find a way to continue the Twilight movie series after the final* installment is released this fall.*Here's hoping, anyway.
Price-gouging at Hogwarts
The NY Times recently posted an article about what they describe as the "unexpected, turbocharged success of the $265 million Potter playland" (i.e., Universal's Wizarding World of Harry Potter th...
Higher and higher
Salon has posted a fascinating (and quite angry) article on the rising price of new e-books. I'm not sure that two e-books costing more than their printed-and-bound equivalents qualifies as a "tr...
The fall of the book-selling empire?
Further hints of the crumbling world of major chain bookstores: Barnes and Noble is considering putting itself up for sale. (Specifically, they're exploring "strategic alternatives", one of which...
We approve.
As longtime readers of the site know, I love reading about frugality. Sadly, Wordcandy hardly ever receives books on this subject, which means I have to either wait patiently for library copies o...
Returned (in part) to the original owner
Newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps Co. is selling the licensing rights for Charles Schulz's 'Peanuts' characters to Iconix Brand Group Inc. (owners of Joe Boxer and London Fog) for a whopping $175 m...
Fun with taxes...
In honor of Tax Day, allow us to point out that you can find copies of Jean Johnson and Scott Bittle's excellent Where Does the Money Go? for as little as $5.99 online.
Sorry, Canada!
I ran across an interesting article about the difference between American and Canadian book prices. Canadians pay approximately 30% more per book, despite the fact that the Canadian and American ...