Penguin’s Puffin Books has a new membership site called We Make Stories, where kids can use an online tool to create stories. There are several types of story creation, including a remix tool to use on existing classic tales, a map maker, and a comic book style creator. It’s all drag and drop type stuff and is intended to teach creativity and encourage literacy.
While this is reasonably fun-looking, I cannot understand why a site would present itself for pay membership and not really give any useful demonstration versions of its tools. There is a single demo based on remixing old stories, but this is not sufficient to make me want to offer $9.99. That price, by the way, is very effectively hidden from view and presented in a rather disturbing manner. Here’s what I mean:
1. First create a user name and password and give us your parent’s email address.
2. Your parent will then get an email asking them to pay for the membership (£5.99/$9.99).
3. Once your parent has paid this, your membership will be activated and you can start to play all the games.
Those are the instruction on the sign-up page. So kids are expected to blunder forth and sign up without the benefit of an effective demonstration. Give away a parent’s email address without permission. Then the parent receives an email demanding money. No sir. Absolutely not. You put the price in big print on the front page and you don’t mislead children into presenting their parents with an unexpected request for money. Everything should be up-front and visible right at the beginning. I just can’t believe what I’m seeing online from a major publisher. Perhaps we have here an example of how the publishing industry intends to get money out of people – by tricking their children.
Marjane Satrapi is the author of the magnificent graphic novel, 
UCLA pediatrician James Yamazaki has put together a very powerful and disturbing collection of artworks by survivors of the atom bomb explosion in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.
In an act that has probably sealed their doom, the Islamic religious government of Iran brutally murdered a young woman by shooting her in the heart as she stood next to her father at a protest march. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran has threatened the protesters with violence and death. This weekend he delivered on his promise when one of his thugs murdered a woman in front of cell phone cameras. These cameras have enabled the world to watch the brutal horror that comes from a religious government. The girl is Neda Soltan, a 26-year-old philosophy student. She does not know it, but the blood that runs from her in the video is probably going to drown Iran’s government in relatively short order.
Disney’s Pixar Animation Studio received a message from a friend of the family of ten-year-old Colby Curtin who was dying of cancer. The message told Pixar that