Media

[close] A place for authors to prep and polish their upcoming (or desired) radio, TV or blog interviews. Authors can share ideas and experience to help other authors do better interviews. Moderator is a former PR professional who retired to write books. I'm learning that many authors don't know the basics of how to pitch an interview, nor how to prep for an interview if offered.

[close] A gathering of folks with social media experience and those just getting started. Designed to help anyone with questions about social media sites. We hope to also show folks how to use social media to promote all sorts of things.

[close] Jacques Ellul cracks open political and sociological commonplaces, destructively and wittily demonstrating how our unthinking acceptance of them encourages hypocrisy, smugness, and mental inertia. Among the stereotypes of thought and speech thus exploded are such phrases as "You can't act without getting your hands dirty," "Work is freedom" and "We must follow the current of history". A certain number of these old saws preside over our daily life. They permit us to understand one another and to swim in the ordinary current of society. They are accepted as so certain that we almost never question them. They serve at once as sufficient explanations for everything and as "clinchers" in too many arguments. Ellul explores the ways in which such clichés mislead us and prevent us from having independent thoughts--and in fact keep us from facing the problems to which they are theoretically addressed. They are our "commonplaces." Just as the nineteenth century brought forth many such commonplaces so our century has been busy creating its own. What Ellul has done is to stand still long enough to look at them carefully, attack them with cool reason, and leave them nakedly exposed. His remarkable caustic fearlessness is at the service of truths that often are cruel, but always are lucid and impassioned. He represents the voice of intelligence, and while doing so is often hilarious and always therapeutic about matters of first importance.

[close] For the love of books!