{"id":2232,"date":"2004-09-07T15:01:41","date_gmt":"2004-09-07T22:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/09\/07\/2232.html"},"modified":"2004-09-07T15:01:41","modified_gmt":"2004-09-07T22:01:41","slug":"o-for-a-muse-of-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2004\/09\/07\/o-for-a-muse-of-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"O for a Muse of paper!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Am staying at Bhadrika &amp; Steve's in Somerville at the moment.  (I keep being startled by the fact that Wolf is 8 and Jazz is 10.  When I was a kid I got annoyed at adults for saying \"You've grown so much!\" so I try not to say that to kids, but sometimes it's an effort.)  They recently started subscribing to a kids' magazine called <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cricketmag.com\/ProductDetail.asp?pid=12\">Muse<\/a>;<\/cite> Jim M. and I spent a while last night leafing through the magazine, and I gotta say I'm really impressed.  It's a magazine of \"science, history, and the arts\" from the publishers of <cite>Cricket<\/cite> and <cite>Smithsonian<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>It's smart, it's funny, and it apparently appeals a great deal to somewhat geeky kids (both boys and girls).  It's got spot illustrations by Larry <cite>(Cartoon History of the Universe)<\/cite> Gonick; it features a cast of \"muses\" from all over the world who occasionally interject comments in little cartoons in the margins, such as Chad, the muse of hardware, from Mali; Aeiou, the muse of software, from Ulan Bator (\"In my spare time, I make lists of things to do\"); Kokopelli, the muse of tunes and tricks, from Arizona; Bo, the muse of factoids, from Abkhazia; and Mimi, the muse of getting along with people, from the Australian outback.  (Plus four others.)<\/p>\n<p>Each issue has an entertaining letter column; a page of factoids (five or six mini-articles, one of which is always false); feature articles on what really killed Napoleon, or parasites, or Phineas Gage (the guy who survived an explosion that blasted a 13-pound iron rod through his brain and changed his personality), or Rube Goldberg machines, or Horatio Hornblower, or old musical instruments.  In one issue there's a list of the top ten ways to tell when someone is trying to sell you a fake perpetual motion machine; in another, there's a reprinted excerpt from a Thurber piece about the difficulty of looking through a microscope.<\/p>\n<p>Those of you with kids in the appropriate age range (it's supposed to be for kids 10 and up, but smart 8-year-olds can enjoy it too)&#8212;or without kids but with an interest in science education&#8212;should check it out.  Good stuff.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and there's a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.musefanpage.com\/\"><cite>Muse<\/cite> fan page<\/a>, run by one of the contributing editors, that provides more info about the magazine; it describes the magazine as (among other things) \"A playground where the best explainers in the business hang out with the funniest, most curious readers anywhere.\"<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Am staying at Bhadrika &amp; Steve&#8217;s in Somerville at the moment. (I keep being startled by the fact that Wolf&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}