Errors of the Year

Journalist Craig Silverman, whose site Regret the Error.com is dedicated to spotting factual mistakes both serious and trivial in the media, has put together a fascinating and sometimes hilarious list of "The Year in Media Errors and Corrections." There's something for everyone -- from an L.A. Times correction about a bear sighting in a supermarket (right bear, wrong day) to a massively strange accusation by a New Brunswick paper that the Canadian Prime Minister had pocketed a communion wafer.

 

The entire list, in all its glory, can be found here. (And if you discover errors in the Barnes & Noble Review, kindly alert the editors -- not Mr. Silverman!)

Featured Title

February 10: The Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke at the British Navy's expense, occurred on this day in 1910. Among the young Bloomsbury conspirators was Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and, though she played only a minor…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.