Tara Thorne

The craziest statistic we read this time last year was over 1,000 magazines launched in 2004. Most of them didn’t make it, of course. But we’re still here, a year and change later, and it’s been quite a freakin’ year. Like every other overpaid columnist in every publication in the world, we will now offer […]

Remember that episode of Friends where Selma Blair tried to get Chandler to cheat on Monica when he was stuck in Oklahoma or wherever the hell for the holidays — stop your lies, you know it as well as we do — and his company’s Christmas bonuses were donations made in every employee’s name to […]

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — the Sundance Film Festival line-up announcement! The fest has announced a return to its independent roots, to which we say we’ll believe it when we freakin’ see it. (Or see the movies, as it were.) But after reading the New York Times this week, we have […]

Bit by bit (torrent) With the music industry’s Napster-related shitfit of a few years ago and the billion-dollar movie industry’s ongoing campaign against downloading (though we haven’t seen those commercials lately, the ones where the prop guy is like “You’re stealing from me,” which, sorry anyone working in the movie industry, you’re doing better than […]

We love Madonna. Unabashedly. Her tenacity and ability to reinvent and reposition herself for as long as we’ve been alive is mind-boggling. And though the music peaked with Ray of Light, we admire her untouched status as a modern pop icon. So we were stoked when our Rolling Stone showed up this week, with an […]

Damage deposit The movie press kit has evolved from business-sized folder with picture CD and press notes into an even more boring, DVD-cased electronic press kit (EPK) featuring pictures, press notes, the trailer and whatnot. So we appreciate it when studios make an effort to jazz up their pressers. For the ridiculously enjoyable 13 Going […]

Just when you thought flying Air Canada couldn’t get any worse, the latest issue of enRoute twists the knife. The same month AC announces you have to pay for meals on all North American routes, the in-flight magazine comes out with its annual Food Issue. Nothing like making hungry travellers read mouth-watering descriptions of Canada’s […]

Have you heard of the latest musical trend, teen sibling pop? The best of the lot is Smoosh, a California guitar-and-drums duo with Death Cab ties and remarkable ears for hooks. And there’s already a subgenre: white-supremacist teen sibling pop! When teen twins Lynx and Lamb Gaede (AKA Prussian Blue, also the name of a […]

We first used the term “publisister” in this space on June 16 of this year, in our first item about Tom Cruise’s Summer of Crazy. A publisister is a publicist who is also the client’s sister, in the familial vein of momager (a mother who is also her child’s manager, like Hilary Duff’s). Cruise’s sister […]

In other Best of , Time has released its list of the best 100 all-time novels. There are the predictables — Catcher in the Rye, Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, Slaughterhouse Five, The Blind Assassin, et al. But a happy surprise is Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which […]