By Drew Grant 12/08/11 4:28pm

Haunted Houses

Everyone loves Blackout!

'The Guardian' Finally Reviews Blackout Haunted House: NYC's Premier Waterboarding Experience

It seems so long ago that we were handcuffed and thrown into the pitch-dark of Blackout Haunted House, the midtown scare-fest that included a whole section of fun-times waterboarding. Our sinuses have all but cleared up entirely, and we’ve put the whole experience behind us.

Not so for Hermione Hoby from The Guardian, who posted her review about Manhattan’s Halloween torture-reenactment event last week (despite the fact that Blackout closed in early November). Read More

By Emily Witt 11/11/11 11:36am

Awards

Mukherjee.

Amy Waldman and Siddhartha Mukherjee on Shortlist for Guardian First Book Award

The Guardian has announced the shortlist for its annual award for the best first book. This year’s list includes former New York Times reporter Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission and Columbia University professor Siddhartha Mukherjee’s history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, which came out in the U.S. last year and has already won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Read More

By Emily Witt 9/14/11 1:07pm

Foreign Correspondents

It is all for U.S.

[UPDATED] The Guardian Launches a U.S. Homepage with a Special American U.R.L.

The Guardian has finally launched its anticipated American web site. Curiously, it did not use GuardianAmerica.com, the ill-fated U.R.L. from its previous venture on this side of the Atlantic (type that in and you just get U.S. news.) Nor has it simply done an automatic redirect to the U.S. page from Guardian.co.uk, which, when accessed from here, has indecipherable headlines about A-Levels and “football” players on its homepage. Read More

By Emily Witt 7/01/11 11:40am

Newspapers

What would Alistair Cooke say?

The Guardian Ends Overseas Print Editions

The expansion of The Guardian‘s international presence online comes with a casualty: the demise of  print editions of The Guardian and its Sunday paper Observer outside the UK.

This affects a whopping total of 40,000 people, whom we picture as a small tribe of eccentric British expatriates in velvet smoking jackets and ascots who probably Read More

By Emily Witt 6/21/11 7:49pm

From the Paper

(Illustration: Joe Wilson.)

The Daily Mail Sets Sail: Fleet Street Fishwrap Takes America

To hear Martin Clarke tell it, The Daily Mail accrued its online readership in America nearly by accident. Lining a landing page with paparazzi shots headlined with expressions of awe and outrage, making the bikini a newsworthy event—that was not transatlantic outreach, just British custom. “Originally we focused ruthlessly on our British audience because that Read More