Scrawled in Wax

Wax Scrawls is an occasional feature here on Scrawled in Wax where I link to things I hope you’ll find interesting. It probably goes without saying, but I usually can’t help throwing my opinion in as well. If you have any cool things you’d like to submit, please send them to navalang [at] gmail [dot] com .

We all know that book publishing is changing – the question is how and why. This post on Forbes argues that Amazon will revolutionize the distribution of books through ‘vertical integration’ i.e. becoming both publisher and retailer, bypassing traditional publishing houses entirely. Fine – but absolutely baffling is that there is no mention whatsoever of the Kindle or the much lower cost of entry and distribution to electronic publishing – which seems mind-bogglingly short-sighted.

In a solid, smart article, Stephen Marche takes lad magazines’ narrow defintion of female beauty to task. It’s clever stuff, particularly in its focus on how standards of beauty start to create expectations that real people can never live up to, turning dating into something like a game of approximation. What is really interesting though is watching Marche flounder a bit with language – when describing the range of what men find attractive he: a) only talks about women; b) uses the term ‘morbidly obese’ so that, even in an article discussing the range of female beauty, he returns to the continuum that values thinness more than its opposite. Oh, the choice of the Megan Fox picture is absolutely priceless.

I never thought I’d say this about a Sports Illustrated article, but this bit on tennis star Justine Henin’s retirement is remarkably poignant. When explaining why she was quitting – at the age of 25! – world No. 1 Henin simply suggests that the fire inside her had gone out. Know those clips in films when a character sees something thought-provoking, says “huh”, and then stares ahead thinking? That was me after I read this.

I don’t know what it is with me and interfaces, but this app for the iPhone that turns the touch-interface into a old-style rotary dial pad is so great I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.

My pal Matthew outlines why a movie based on the smart, sophisticated video game Bioshock is probably a bad idea.

And finally, my new music recs can be found here on my Muxtape. There, among others, you’ll find a beautiful track by Dirty Three, an absolutely banging one by Santogold and… a track by Ashlee Simpson. Yeah, yeah – blame Rex.