1. I’m babbling about my book over on my agent Caren’s website today.
2. The “Hot Girls Make Great Clothes” thread has sparked up some lively conversation that involves pig anuses, boob jobs, and Keebler elves among other things….
Back in 1997 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote a piece titled “In Praise of Cheap Labor” on Slate.
Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land–or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?
The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit–and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards
I had never read this piece before, but it feels like I have, and to…
You can’t go much more against the grain of the global market than this: American Apparel now open at Shanghai’s 1933 Building…
(Just to be clear, I photoshopped the cover a bit.)
A year ago, I had just signed with my agent Caren. Next week WAIW? will be featured in TIME Magazine.
But you can read TIME’s review of WAIW? now. It’s not a very long review, but it’s a nice one. As I’ve done with other reviews, here are some highlights:
“…a quixotic journey…often loopy…all over the developing world…Timmerman’s youthful exuberance carries this unlikely consumer tale.”
The issue doesn’t come out until next week. However, I can assure you that I didn’t make the cover. But this guy did. And that’s perhaps more exciting.
It’s not just any old issue of TIME. It’s a commemorative one! …
Ann at Booklorn is hosting a contest to win an autographed copy of WAIW? She says you’re eligible “if you live on planet Earth…Sorry, currently not shipping to other planets.”
So get on over to Booklorn and sign up….
The contest in which you try to guess what vegetable our unborn baby will be compared to continues. This week the email update said our baby is the size of a jicama (???). Anyone ever heard of a jicama?
Apparently it’s a Mexican potato sometimes referred to as a yam bean. More than giving me an idea of the size of our offspring these updates make me feel like I don’t know squash about produce.
I figured there was no way anyone guessed that. Then I started to scan the comment threads. Karly nailed it. I’ll be sending her a copy of WAIW? in the next week or two. I should get my official copies soon. You’ll know as soon as they…
I interviewed students at Ball State U. here in Muncie on Halloween and asked them “Where are you wearing?”
It was a lot of fun and I’d like to thank all of those students who took time out of their busy days spent passing out free hugs, playing four square, hittin’ hookahs, and possibly studying…but apparently not studying geography.
Portions of this video will be combined with portions of my first attempt at a book trailer. After viewing this, my publicist, Cynthia, told me that I probably should drop the “bong boys.” So, watch this video now because the bong boys (smoking flavored tobacco, nothing illegal) probably got to go and they cracked me up.
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