It's easy to forget, because Ebert is a TV persona: this guy can write.

Amos Poe's Frogs for Snakes is not a film so much as a filmed idea. That could be interesting, but alas, it is a very bad idea.

He's equally interesting whether the film is good, bad, or mediocre. Ebert, like McPhee and Angell and Gopnick, is fascinating when writing about things you don't care about.

But that's not why I'm reading Movie Yearbook this year. Nor is it my increasingly insistent hankering -- shared, fortunately, with Linda -- for frequent injections of narrative. I'm deeply entangled in planning a roundtable on hypertext narrative and Flash, and it's truly impressive to see just how many stories -- very expensive stories! -- the Industry generates in 30 months.

I wandered, quite by accident, into an exhibit of some pages from this young Jewish woman's journey through adolescence and Nazism at Boston's MFA. My first impression was, "What an interesting, unknown diary!" My second was, "This is really sophisticated German graphic design, masquerading as a naive diary."

If she'd lived fifty years later, Salomon would have defined Web memoir.

I'd never heard of Salomon. It seems to me she's the direct ancestor of Spiegelman and Eisner. Fascinating. (Note: the edition weighs in at 832 pages, almost all of them plates. I wish there were more commentary, but the volume already pushes the limits of practical binding.)

Stylish, detailed, lavishly produced discussions of a series of high-design examples. More sophisticated than the run-of-the-mill How To books, though much space is still consumed with elementary instructions.

Confidential to designers: I believe you'll find that the root of "deconstruction" is "to construe", not "to construct." You don't need to abuse this too, too trendy word, because "dissection" is already available for your use at no extra charge.