All the news we can wrap in a Friday afternoon bundle:
French and more French
Vanessa R. Schwartz’s It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture got a brief write-up in the January 12 Financial Times. If you’d like more, navigate to the website of UC-Irvine professor of history and KPFK radio host Jon Wiener for archived audio from an interview he conducted with Schwartz for his show on Wednesday.
A new job for John Nagl
Lt. Col. John Nagl was the commander of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley. He served in Operation Desert Storm, was the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was on the writing team for The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. But now, according to this article appearing in Wednesday’s Washington Post, “he has decided to leave the service to study strategic issues full time at a new Washington think tank.”
Nagl was also featured this Wednesday on NPR’s Fresh Air discussing his strategy for the future of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. You can find archived audio here.
Get your personal paparazzi
David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife is quoted in an article in Time magazine about the latest twist in America’s obsession with fame: paparazzi-for-hire to follow and photograph you and satisfy your desire for a taste of celebrity. From the Time article:

Grazian… calls personal paparazzi reality marketers, who make the act of being photographed more meaningful than the actual photos. “The goal isn’t to produce a product,” he says. “It’s to heighten the experience of the event. In that sense, there doesn’t even need to be any film in the camera.”

An author’s guide to promotion
Reality-based self-promotion is discussed in “How to be an Author” in the Careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is by William Germano, himself the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books and From Dissertation to Book. We will release a new edition of Getting It Published late this year that will include new material similar to the CHE article.
The colors of plants
Also reviewed in the January 12 Financial Times was David Lee’s Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color. The reviews says it is “an elegantly produced and beautifully illustrated cross between personal memoir, botanical miscellany, and student text.”