What’s your dream job, and why?
What was the last prose book you read and how was it?
I’m currently reading The Unloved by Deborah Levy, but if you mean last prose book I finished, it’s another Levy: Black Vodka, a collection of her short stories. I liked it a lot, because I love the way she uses language. Before that, it was Geoff Klock’s book about Matt Fraction’s Casanova, The Future of Comics, The Future of Man, which was… interesting and frustrating in equal amounts? I’m trying to think what the last full-length novel I finished was, and I’m utterly blanking. I think it was a Dortmunder, but I can’t remember.
For a monthly magazine, I maintain, unless you’re in porn, there’s no money in doing a tablet edition of a magazine. Now we can see, and the results are there, that tablet growth — it just ain’t happening. We’ve been living with tablets for long enough now that we can see that people who like to read on tablets read on tablets, and those who want to read on print read on print. We can see there continue to be more people who read on paper than off of a backlit screen.
And again, there’s no money in adding those extra editions. There’s the production cost: I think everyone was fooled in the beginning by thinking ‘Oh, we can just do one version for Apple and that’s it.’ Now there are myriad different tablets, different operating systems, different formats, which means that what everyone thought just meant posting PDFs, now the demands mean there being moving video, streams, and all kinds of things.
We all know that it takes an extra six or seven staff to make a tablet edition and do it well. And we can’t recover that. The money’s not there every month to recoup that. An advertiser is not going to pay that much more money just because you’re offering them a tablet edition. In fact, they want it as added value. We haven’t found a way, and I haven’t seen anyone who’s making it work. And, certainly on this side of the Atlantic, you’re seeing a lot of the monthly magazines retreat from their tablet editions completely, because it’s just not bearing the fruit that we thought.
While the approach has only been tested in mice, researchers said on Wednesday it proved surprisingly good at clearing tangles of plaques linked to Alzheimer’s in the animals’ brains and improving their memory, as measured by tests such as navigating a maze.
In the past, high-energy ultrasound has been combined with injected microbubbles, which vibrate in response to sound waves, to get drugs across the so-called blood brain barrier.
But the new research, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, is the first demonstration that ultrasound alone might have a beneficial effect on the memory-robbing condition.
