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Monday Tally: Goodbye Greek, Hello Google

monday-tag-150px Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!

Discover Magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog put together a long list of female science writers, many of whom have some interesting looking pop science nonfiction. Thanks to @BiblioEva for linking to this one.

NPR and ProPublica put together a powerful multimedia package on five soldiers who suffered traumatic brain injuries during the same explosion in Iraq. I haven’t gotten through the entire package yet, but the parts I’ve read and listened to are great journalism.

In her recent review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s second memoir, Committed, Raych (books i done read) made a point I really liked about the purpose of travel writing (emphasis mine), which speaks to exactly why I find Bill Bryson so frustrating as a travel writer:

In the end, I’m unsure how to feel about this. Gilbert speaks my language – jovial white girl, casual tourist, occasionally pissed by how The Man is screwing her – but I LIVE with my own voice. I read to live a thousand lives, not to have my own ignorant worldview parrotted back to me.

One of my guilty pleasure television shows for the last couple of years has been ABC Family’s Greek, a look at Greek life on a college campus. This show has always been more interesting and engaging than the premise suggests, and I’ve really liked seeing the characters grow up. After the series finale, which I just got around to watching this weekend, I found a couple of good television critic wrap ups of the show. EW’s Pop Watch blog give five reasons they’ll miss the show (all reasons I agree with), and EW’s Inside TV blog had an interview with the show’s creator, Patrick Sean Smith. I loved this explanation of the end of the show (and his explanation of Cappie’s name, which means nothing unless you’ve watched the show):

What I came to in that name was — and what I wanted the end of this to be — was a bit of an anthem for our millennial audience we’ve been so aware of through the run of the series. Things are rough right now. There are no jobs, but keeping that fighting spirit and say, “We can get through this together” was the thing I really liked in his name. [It] kind of brought that all together for me.

One of the most interesting pieces of bookish news in the last week was about how a self-published author who has made about $1 million selling her books on Amazon, Amanda Hocking, signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press. This profile from the Star Tribune is great, and gets at a lot of the interesting questions this deal brings up for both Hocking and publishing in general.

I haven’t used Google’s new recipe search, but this in-depth article from Food52 points out some of the problems it might have. I’m curious whether Google is planning other topic-specific search engines, and what other challenges might come up.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Vasilly March 28, 2011, 10:41 am

    Thanks for the Discover magazine and NPR links. When I think of female science writers, only Mary Roach comes to mind. I’ve read a few stories about soldiers suffering from brain damage so I’ll definitely click on that link. Have a great week.

    • Kim March 28, 2011, 4:30 pm

      Vasilly: Mary Roach, Rebecca Skloot, and Deborah Blum are the three that come to mind for me. The Discover link is great because it has many science writers I’d never heard of before.

  • Steph March 28, 2011, 12:28 pm

    I loved Greek too! I have been watching it for years now and was really sorry to see it end (though I did think the finale was wonderful). Such a funny, amusing show that I think perfectly captures what it is to be young and at college. I felt no shame in liking it!

    • Kim March 28, 2011, 4:32 pm

      Steph: I liked the finale a lot too. I felt like it balanced just the right sense of nostalgia with looking ahead and leaving the characters in good places. It made me happy 🙂 And I agree — the reason I liked it so much is because of how well it got the whole young and college thing, even if you weren’t at all part of the Greek system.

  • Christina March 29, 2011, 6:31 am

    I loved Greek as well! I knew this was going to be the last season, but I was totally shocked that it was already time for the finale. I agree with both you and Steph. I am in no way affiliated with the Greek system but I still feel like those characters “got” me. They understood college so well!

    I haven’t read anything by Bryson and after reading your post on him, I feel like I would feel the same way. I don’t really read travelogues; instead, I focus on travel guides as I enjoy planning my own dream vacations.

    • Kim March 31, 2011, 7:37 pm

      Christina: I didn’t see the finale coming at all — I wasn’t keeping up with the news about the show. And agreed — the show really “got” college, even if their particular experiences were different from mine.

      I usually like travel writing, but his travelogues don’t quite do it for me. But there are plenty of others I do love, so I’m not to bummed about it.

  • Erin March 29, 2011, 3:10 pm

    Google has a recipe search? Whoa!

    • Kim March 31, 2011, 7:37 pm

      Erin: Cool, right? I didn’t know about it until I read that article.