This is from outside the Bergen home of Norway’s royal family. Here’s another beautiful photo of this mansion in wintertime.
All posts by philwade
Kirkus Reviews Also Folds
Nielsen Business Media, which is closing down Editor & Publisher magazine, is also stopping production of Kirkus Reviews, which was known for it’s honest, even blunt, book reviews. “There was no sense of any financial distress within the Kirkus brand,” the editor said.
Editor & Publisher Magazine Folds
Editor & Publisher, a magazine which has covered the newspaper industry for 125 years, is closing down this month. The editor, Greg Mitchell, says it wasn’t a complete surprised, but it kinda was.
Describing E&P, Mitchell states, “I don’t think there are too many trade publications that were as independent and critical as we are, and we made some people angry because of that. We were calling for more Web focus way before it was fashionable; we were critical of many moves the industry was making and not making . . .”
Power Loss
Justin Buzzard: “We lose power if we do not concentrate on the right thing.”
Christmas Books
Here are some Christmas book recommendations from the good people at Reformation 21. Stephen Nichols, who adds in another post Richard Doster’s Crossing the Lines, which I reviewed last summer.
Sean Lucas, who actually links to the books in his post.
All of these men recommend a new, beautiful release of Pilgrim’s Progress by Crossway Books. What I’ve seen of the illustrations look superbly fantastic. It’s worth our attention.
Leaving Their Names Off
Did you hear about The Manhattan Declaration a few weeks ago? The document says in part:
While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.
Here are a few very respected men who left their names off the declaration and their reasons for declining to sign.
High Entertainment
Lars refers to highbrow art in the last post. Obviously, he was thinking of this holiday classic:
There’s no need to thank me for bringing this up. It’s my pleasure.
Poe’s First Book Sells for $662,500
The auction on Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, which we mentioned before, has sold for $662,500. Note the beat-up book in the photo.
The Fruit of the Spirit
“The best writing tip I ever got,” writes Andree Seu, was not a variety of good statements, but something much deeper.
Don’t Feed the Other Dog
Frank Wilson links to a fascinating interview of one of the U.N.’s expert reviewers for the climatology information and reports. It’s 30 minutes and there’s a transcript. Aynsley Kellow is what I wish all scientists would be, at least in the humble, honest way he presents himself here.
I find this statement remarkable:
Just by way of an interesting example, Garth Paltridge, who is in Hobart here and has now retired, did a paper looking at all the weather balloon data which is available for about 50 years and couldn’t find much evidence that as the Earth had warmed slightly that vital increase in water vapour was there. He eventually had it published but when it was first submitted for publication it was rejected on the basis that the message that it would send would give too much encouragement to sceptics, which really just draws attention to the need to open up the scientific process, to deal with this kind of attempt to politicise it, to suppress views that are inconvenient, because unless we very quickly establish and re-establish some quality assurance mechanisms in the conduct of climate science then we’re heading for a potentially very costly…either way a very costly set of policy responses based on some science in which we can have much less faith now than we had in the past.