The Daily Square – Sleep of the Just Edition
Daily links from booksquare: booksquare
A Little Friendly Bragging
One of the privileges of being me (as opposed to one of the privileges of living with me) is that I have brilliant, smart, creative friends. And I don’t brag about them (brag on them? I am told this is proper English, but my people don’t speak this way) often enough. And I should. So I am going to is get all excited about a friend, just because I can. My friend Jill Monroe, who just happened to write of the BS’s most popular perennial posts (which she needs to update, hint, hint), is one of the funniest people I
On Modern Education
We get ourselves all hot and bothered about the teaching of reading, about synthetic phonics and the like, and we forget that none of it is much use unless children want to read in the first place. The motivation must come first, horse before cart. We all know that unless a child is motivated to learn, then there will be apathy or resistance in the learning process. They are much more likely to want to deal with the difficulties of learning to read if they know it is these words that give them access to all these wonderful stories. If
What’s Good For the Directors Isn’t Necessarily Good For the Writers
Though it goes against my very nature, I have resisted commenting on the recently reached DGA/AMPTP accord — the settlement of contractual issues between the Director’s Guild of America and the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers — to let the deal points sink in. Not surprisingly, this period of reflection hasn’t changed my initial position: good for producers, lousy for talent. No one individual can say, “I own this.” I go into this in great detail at Medialoper, but want to address some writer-specific points here. First, while the DGA deal might very well be historic in that
The Funny Thing About Settlements
So naturally, I am reading all the news about this entity and that entity cutting deals with the WGA directly. I am also imagining all the major producers gnashing their teeth in frustration. Oh, man, this has got to rankle. And not necessarily for the reason you think. Residuals — the basis for this two-month old strike — are, by and large, easily calculated. Though creaky and cumbersome, the formulas used to pay various types of talent are monolithic. Or, if you will, percentages might vary, but the methodology remains the same across all guilds. Oh, to be sure, over