Catching Up

A whirlwind week of prepping is over and BEA is finally here! So, we’re taking a blogging mini-break and just providing some links today.

Here is the Washington Post’s BEA preview and and the AP’s which focusses on the politics of publishing’s schmoozefest.

Here is today’s NYTimes review of The Da Vinci Code, which devotes some space to the marketing strategy we remarked on a few weeks back:

The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures’ ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is “The Da Vinci Code” a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What’s up with Tom Hanks’s hair?

Finally, on Saturday, Tim Harford posted another Undercover Economist column to Slate.com, this time he answers the age-old question, ‘should you buy rental car insurance?’

“anyone who pays even slightly more than the fair premium to escape from a risk on a $90 phone or a $900 insurance deductible must be making a mistake. The stakes are too tiny: In the context of a $1 million lifetime income, even $900 is a small enough risk to swallow. We should turn down these offers of insurance and save the money in a contingency fund to pay for the occasional loss. The odds would be well in our favor and the petty uncertainty shouldn’t cause us a single sleepless night.”