Mob Hits For April 2, 2008

Things Are Tough All Over: While today's Observer occupied itself with the discontent of magazine writers, The Los Angeles Times' Paul Cullum checked in with Daniel Waters, one very unhappy screenwriter. Waters, who wrote 1989's dark high school satire Heathers (as well as several other films he'll be glad we don't mention), gripes, "You kid yourself into thinking, 'I'm going to do one for them and one for me,' and then you realize they're all for them... So I came to this point where I realized I hadn't really written anything -- I don't even have that drawer full of Orson Welles projects that never got made. 'Sex and Death 101' came out of just wanting something in the drawer, so that when I'm dangling from a noose above it, there it is." (Let's hope Waters doesn't read Rex Reed's review!)

A Tale of Two Britneys: The Huffington Post's Danny Shea makes a good catch: OK!'s Britney Spears cover (Britney Lost 15 LBs In Just 4 Weeks!) features a Glamour photo from 5 years ago. (Jezebel caught it, too, in a post about magazines curbing rampant airbrushing.)

Reading is Fundamental: Nerve's Caitlin MacRae interviews Solitary Vice: Against Reading author Mikita Brottman who sees a softening of book-related snobbery. "I do think it's true now that people tend to judge one another less by their set of collective references than they used to. If I refer to a Shakespeare character and someone doesn't know what I'm talking about, I'm not going to count that as a strike against them... There are so many different cultural frames of reference that there's less elitism, less of a sense that one is superior to the other." Someone must've missed this week's Most Emailed Times story.