Food for Thought Fridays: Now you can smell like a book!

TGIF!  I'm exhausted from all of my post-vacation cleanup, so I'm looking forward to a weekend of doing lots and lots of nothing.  Because I was gone for part of the week, I didn't get a chance to collect as many links, but I still found some gems that I hope you'll enjoy as much as I did.

All Things Books

Do you love the musty, dusty smell of books?  Well, so does Karl Lagerfeld, and now he's given you a perfume so you can walk around smelling like a library all day.  Mmm, fictiony...

Nina Metz dissects why she thinks book trailers ultimately fail.

io9 has the scoop on the footage from the movie version of Stephenie Meyer's The Host that was shown at San Diego Comic-Con.  I'm looking forward to this one!

YA Highway is doing a HUGE giveaway in celebration of their 3rd anniversary.  Among the prizes: a Kindle or Nook, tons of ARCs, and critiques of your work by some of the blog's collaborators.

It's official: Mockingjay will be split into two movies.  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  I love the book, but I'm really stumped as to how they're going to portray Katniss's inner struggles, which really dominate the book.

Fans take to Twitter to speed the revealing of Cassandra Clare's A Clockwork Princess.  How cool is that?

News from the Publishing World

Forbes speculates on how the publishing industry will look in the future.

Around the Interwebs

Author Lauren DeStefano wrote a fantastic blog post entitled The art of being a human being.

Bring the Funny

Big Ten mascots want you to call them, maybe?  (Ah, college...  Those were the days!)

Gaming

Games Industry International examines how Feminist Frequency's Anita Sarkeesian "beat the trolls" and discusses some of the industry's deep-seated problems with sexism and a lack of female game developers.  I am really looking forward to Sarkeesian's forthcoming series on tropes in video games.

Food for Thought Fridays: It's a bad time to be a woman

I'm a bit off this week as I skipped yesterday's Thumbs Up Thursdays post because I was off doing some offline things.  I know--I have a life offline.  Shocking! ;)

However, I've been collecting a lot of links over the past week, so I have some good stuff for my Food for Thought Fridays post.  But as I was collecting a bunch of interesting, humorous links, two big issues suddenly came to the fore, and they are so important I think they are deserving of their own post.  Fair warning: there is some graphic material in some of these links.

The first big issue to emerge this week was a rash of articles inspired by the attacks against Anita Sarkeesian, who creates the videos on the wonderful Feminist Frequency channel on YouTube.  If you've never watched any of her videos, you should.  She does fantastic analysis of the treatment of women in various types of pop culture.  If you follow the links below, you'll read all about the unconscionable backlash provoked by her Kickstarter project to produce a series of videos about female trope use in video games.  This is a subject about which I am particularly passionate, being an avid, life-long gamer myself.  The one redeeming part of this horrible story is that, as of writing this post, Sarkeesian has raised $143,298--and her original goal was $6,000.  It's good to know a lot of other people are just as outraged as I am.  You can read about the terrible debacle in more detail:

Sarkeesian's blog post about the harassment she suffered, just because she started her Kickstarter project.

The blog Shattersnipe has an excellent a post deconstructing the rape culture in the gaming world.

Kate or Die's comic about the frustrations of trying to discuss rape culture in the gaming world with other gamers.

Slate's XXfactor takes a look at how misogyny online can sometimes be desensitizing, using Jezebel's articles as a jumping-off point.

ThinkProgress's The Guy's Guide to Being a Feminist Ally in Video Gaming.


While I normally try to remain politically neutral on this blog, I feel so strongly about what happened to Michigan House Representative Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield), that I can't stay silent on this issue.  Though the Republican House leadership has changed its story several times, Brown was apparently banned from speaking on the House floor because she had the temerity to use the word "vagina" while speaking this week.  This sparked a Twitterstorm, so it will be interesting to see how the leadership deals with the fallout from this issue.

The theme tying these two items together is the way in which society views and treats women.  As a feminist, I think often about this, and I am really disturbed by the idea that our young women and girls will sometimes have to face this sort of treatment.  I really hope to see this sort of misogyny die a very public, painful death.  I firmly believe in equality for all people, regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual preference, or creed, and I hope others will continue to stand up and loudly proclaim their support for equality.

Food for Thought Fridays: NPR hosts are pretty darn funny!

Today, I'll be kicking off the first of my Food for Thought Fridays posts.  These are basically an eclectic collection of links to stories, videos, book reviews--basically, anything that catches my fancy over the week because it's interesting, worth thinking about, or just plain hilarious.

News from the Publishing World

Barnes & Noble is not happy about the Justice Department's proposed settlements with the publishers accused of colluding with Apple.

All Things Books

Ray Bradbury dies at the age of 91.  If you've never read Fahrenheit 451, you really, really should.

Looking for good summer reads?  Epic flowchart to the rescue!

Seventeen-year-old Sarah Turbin wins the contest to redesign the cover for An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.

Lev Grossman meditates on reading while walking. (Pssst, Lev, ever heard of an audio book?)

Harry Potter fans, you just may need to get a Sony Play Station: J.K. Rowling has written new content for the game Book of Spells.

Authors make the world a better place: best selling author James Patterson has created an endowment at my alma mater, Michigan State University, to fund scholarships for teachers training in urban areas.

Self-Publishing

Some good advice on things to consider before self-publishing a book. 

Jessica Park's rousing explanation of why she thinks self-publishing trumps publishing houses.

Kobo throws its hat into the ring of self-publishing platforms.

Around the Interwebs

This infographic provides way more information than you've ever wanted to know about Pinterest users.

Slate's Future of Food feature contains a wealth of information, including an examination of why Home Ec should be a mandatory subject in school.

This infographic makes the case that there's a gender gap in coverage of the 2012 elections.

Bring the Funny

Just in case you thought NPR hosts don't have a sense of humor, they decided to prove you wrong by doing a dramatic reinterpretation of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe".

I've heard even President Obama is a big fan of that song.