Josh Boone answers a question about the TFIOS soundtrack

A tumblr user asked Josh on his tumblr to have "Neutral Milk Hotel" (songs: "Holland, 1945" & "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea") on the TFIOS soundtrack and Josh said, "One of my favorite albums and one of my favorite songs. I can't make any promises, but it's my intention to try."

Check out the songs UNDER THE CUT:

Holland, 1945

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

On Friday, Susie and I will go to Amherst for the weekend to see old friends and visit old places, so I shan't be blogging until next week.  No doubt the world will scarcely notice.

Josh Boone posts pictures of signs in TFIOS office in Pittsburgh, Richardson of the script

Director Josh Boone posted pictures of the production office signs on his tumblr. Looks like Pittsburgh is getting ready.

It's also the reappearance of the logo. We can't wait to see if this is maybe the official one?

Our cinematographer, Ben Richardson, also posted a picture of the TFIOS script on his twitter.

PITCHING HORSESHOES

I think the time has come to say something about the curious coalition of political forces on the left and the right uniting to oppose drone strikes, government surveillance, and increased defense spending.  I will start by reproducing a column I wrote eight years ago for a website called antiwar.com.  Then I will bring my discussion up to date with some contemporary observations.  Here is the column exactly as it originally appeared.

 

May 25, 2005

On Left and Right

by Robert Paul Wolff

Some while ago, a fellow leftie put me on to Antiwar.com. I took a look at the site, bookmarked it, and have ever since been a regular visitor, sometimes clicking on it two or three times in a day. I have even on occasion donated money to keep it afloat. I find there a broad array of factual reports and opinions consonant with my distressed and outraged view of an America seemingly gone mad with imperial hubris and pathological self-delusion.   Being somewhat dim about such things, I did not at first notice that the site is hosted and sustained by right-wing libertarians whose position on the conventional political spectrum is as far from my own as it is possible to get without falling off the other edge of the world from my own. Whereas I look to Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said for intellectual simulation and solace, reaching back, when I desire some historical perspective, to Karl Marx, the managers of antiwar.com are more likely to reach out to Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, with obligatory obeisances to the authors of the Federalist Papers.   This is not the first time I have found myself in suspicious company. Thirty-five years ago, when I published In Defense of Anarchism, I was chagrined to receive congratulatory notes from the likes of Murray Rothbard, and to be offered, by an earnest graduate student, without a word, a tattered copy of Lysander Spooner's No Treason. Indeed, in the sixties, it was often said that the political spectrum was shaped like a horseshoe, with the two ends a good deal closer to one another than either was to the middle. Nevertheless, an America in which the most trenchant, uncompromisingly condemnatory critique of the present administration issues from the pen of Patrick Buchanan clearly requires some new direction of analysis.   I am united with my libertarian brethren in a hatred of the imperial state, and in my disdain for the dishonesty, self-delusion, and wanton profligacy of this nation's policies in the Middle East. I am one with them, also, in my dismay at the erosion of such individual liberties as survived the post World War II era. But if I may speak as a philosopher, I and they are most at odds in the realm of possibility, not of actuality. I would support a foreign policy that genuinely furthered progressive economic and political developments throughout the world, whereas they would view such policies, even if they might be sympathetic to some of them, as an inappropriate overreaching of state power and a violation of the authority that could justly be assigned to the state by an alert and vigilant electorate. I believe, as they fervently do not, that capitalism rests on exploitation, as Marx argued, and I am therefore always ready to consider ways in which the state might mitigate, if not vitiate, the capitalist economic regime.   But since the United States does not, in actuality, offer me the slightest hope of being able to throw my support enthusiastically behind a government that truly embodies the principles in which I believe, I am left to consider how best to resist the advances of the imperial expansionism that has captured the state. And in this effort, as necessary as it is disheartening, I find myself reaching out to those at the other end of the political spectrum.   We can surely agree on the necessity of defeating politically the drive for U. S. military hegemony. We even can agree on several of the most hotly contended social issues that currently divide the electorate – same-sex marriage, abortion rights, rights of free expression. If we can somehow turn this nation from its imperial path, then there will be time enough to fight over the justice or injustice of capitalism, the need for collective social action to provide decent wages and health care, or the merits of federal restraints on corporate depredations.   As the past two elections have demonstrated, the politically active fraction of the electorate is very evenly divided between the two major political parties. It is also the case that the center of the political spectrum has shifted dramatically to the right, with only a handful of genuine old-fashioned Rooseveltian liberals left in Congress [with the honorable and important exception of the Black Caucus], and increasing numbers of stone-age troglodytic reactionaries masquerading in the Republican Party as conservatives. An alliance of Blue State Democrats with true blue libertarian conservatives would have a reasonable chance of defeating the imperialists. It might then be possible to get America to stand down from its militarism and imperial expansionism, and return us to the far better, though admittedly unsatisfactory state of affairs of only a few years ago.   This alliance would undoubtedly splinter almost as soon as it had triumphed, for on a wide range of important domestic issues the partners disagree irreconcilably. Nevertheless, in a world gone mad, we must learn to cherish second bests. As Paul Newman says to Robert Redford in The Sting, when explaining to him the workings of the Big Con, if we succeed, it won't be enough, but it is all we will get, so you have to be willing to walk away. --------------------------------------------------- Well, that is the column, as I wrote it then.  Things have changed a good deal in the intervening eight years.  The politicians who today style themselves as libertarians turn out to favor an intrusive, repressive state when it comes to reproductive rights or same sex marriage, which suggests that their libertarianism is a fraud.  They may worship at the altar of Ayn Rand, but faux philosopher as she was, she would been horrified at the stance they have adopted in her name.  The effort by these apostles of liberty to suppress voting among those whose politics they find distasteful bears no relation whatsoever to the principles they profess to embrace.   The second difference is that although we now have a genuinely more progressive administration in office which is a good deal more cautious about the use of military force abroad, it has embraced and extended the surveillance state of its predecessor in ways that it will be extremely difficult to roll back.   Meanwhile, the increasing economic inequality in America and the destruction of the life chances of scores of millions of Americans has made the need for genuine economic transformation imperative, and in any such effort, our libertarian brethren will be mortal enemies.  Nevertheless, Paul Newman's wise advice to Robert Redford remains true today.  Perhaps we should make common cause with the Rand Pauls of this world when it comes to the surveillance state, and expect all-out war when we try to rectify economic exploitation.

Nat Wolff visits UCLA cancer center

Nat Wolff visited the UCLA cancer center and tweeted about his experience: 'Met so many amazing people. We wanna make sure fault in our stars honors them.' 

We're so glad everyone involved works on honoring them with such dedication.

Be sure to follow Nat's twitter

Shailene Woodley confirms she is cutting her hair to play Hazel

During The Spectacular Now press junket, Shailene Woodley confirmed to Up and Comers, that she is indeed chopping all of her hair in two weeks to play Hazel Grace. Filming starts on August 26.

She also mentioned it in an interview with veryaware, saying she tried on wigs to see what length they want to cut it.

Q: Are you going to cut your hair for THE FAULT IN OUR STARS?

SW: I am. I tried on wigs yesterday to see what length we want to do it and I’m going to cut it in two weeks.

Excitement!

Source / 2

Josh Boone posts pictures of Pittsburgh & engages in cute Convo with Nat and John on Twitter

Josh Boone posted 2 pictures of Pittsburgh (where he is currently prepping for TFIOS) on his tumblr, commenting them with "Beautiful Pittsburgh!"

UPDATE:

He appeared to be in the Pittsburgh Children's Hospital doing research for TFIOS, one amazing fan on twitter found out

John also teased about Josh sending him TFIOS prep info.

Josh, Nat Wolff (Isaac) and John Green also engaged in a very cute convo on twitter. 

Josh Boone's tumblr

John's, Nat's and Josh's twitter

SIX GENERATIONS

My granddaughter, Athena, will be five on Thursday.  Three weeks later she will start kindergarten.  Grandpa has been accorded the privilege of giving her, as a birthday present, the new backpack she will need for this momentous occasion.   When Athena's mother, Diana, told me that Athena would be starting kindergarten, I recalled a brief excerpt from a tape recording that my father made of his mother's reminiscences in 1971.  At that point, my grandmother, Ella Nislow Wolff, was either ninety-three or ninety-four, depending on whose recollections one trusts.  Her age had always been a matter of some dispute in the family, because she was a year older than her husband, Barney, and she tried, without success, to conceal this fact by lying about her age.

Here is my Grandmother's recollection, as I transcribed it from the tape, without, however, managing to capture the distinctive Vilna accent that she retained more than eighty years after coming to America:
 

Miss Moses was a school teacher that my little sister - was not in her class, but the little sister was one that caused a great discussion of having kindergarten.  She was so marvelous at her age, she was four and a half years, not quite, then [that] they started to talk about having kindergarten in America.

She died as a child, that’s why Rosabelle has her name.    So they came to the father to tell the father why should a child as intelligent as this sort be working in a shop.  She should get a chance to get somewhere, she should get schooling.  So of course there was no compulsory schooling then so they talked but my father didn’t even pay attention to this.  I went on working.  But my little sister went to school, but unfortunately she got - that terrible winter that we had with diphtheria that time in New York, she was one of those who passed away that time.

 

The father who would not hear of his little girl going to kindergarten was Athena's great great great grandfather, my grandmother's father.  There is this slender thread stretching across one hundred twenty years or more and six generations.  Some day, I hope, long after I have died, Athena, all grown up, will read the book I wrote about my grandparents and learn something of her lineage.  Perhaps, if I am very fortunate, that book will be passed on to her children, and her children's children.  My fondest dream is that, as my grandfather's life in socialist politics inspired me, perhaps my life in the Academy will inspire Athena and her children.

John Green and Josh Boone share their thoughts on Shailene's TFIOS audition on tumblr

Josh Boone reblogged a gifset from Shailene's MTV interview in which she shortly talks about her TFIOS audition, commenting it with "I LOVED what she did."

John Green reblogged it again saying "Also loved what she did. She made me cry, and TFIOS-related things basically never make me cry, on account of how I know what's going to happen and everything."

With Josh and John constantly gushing about Shailene's audition, we can't wait to see how she is as Hazel Grace.

Find the original post on John Green's or Josh Boone's tumblr to reblog.

SOKAL, FISH, SCIENCE, AND BLUE HERONS

Those of you who have been following the comments section will know that several commentators and I have been discussing the Sokal affair and the response by Stanley Fish, who was at the time the General Editor under whom the journal Social Text fell [but not the editor of that journal itself, as one commentator somewhat inaccurately asserted.]  While taking my daily walk yesterday morning [which was enlivened by sightings of two Blue Herons, two deer, and a rabbit!], I had an extended conversation with an imaginary audience [my preferred mode of thinking] in which I attempted to set the Sokal flap in a larger context.  It occurred to me that some of you might have some interest in what I was thinking.  [This is, of course, the operational hubrison which blogging is premised.  It has a rather uncomfortable similarity to Anthony Weiner's narcissistic sexting, as I am all too aware.  But then, that is a subject for another day.]

Let me begin in 1620 with Francis Bacon's publication of the Novum Organum [right away, you can see this is going to take a while, but then, it is a long walk.]  Bacon laid out a method of investigating nature that consisted, essentially, in making long lists of observations, organizing them into what he called tables of presence and absence, increase and decrease, and then using them to check hypotheses about the nature of natural phenomena.  For example, if I wanted to figure out what heat is, I would first make a list of all the hot things I could think of [soup boiling on a stove, a stone sitting in the noonday sun, my forehead after a vigorous workout, etc.] and all the cold things I could think of [a piece of ice, my feet after a long walk in snow, and so forth], and then collect observations of cases in which something is felt to heat up or cool down.  Then I might try out an hypothesis:  heat is the presence in an object of blood.  Well, that works for my forehead after a vigorous walk, but it does not work for a pot of boiling soup.  So that hypothesis is rejected.  You get the idea.

This scientific method had a number of very interesting and important implications.  Consider  just three, which were vigorously contested by some of Bacon's contemporaries, such as Descartes.  First:  the right way to learn about nature is to observe it with the senses, by looking at  it, listening to it, touching it, even tasting it;  Second, there is an absolute differentiation between the observations we make of nature and the theories we formulate to explain nature -- the theories are, as we would say but Bacon did not, theory neutral;  and Third, scientific knowledge is, by its very nature, ever-expanding, ever growing, because the collection of observations keeps getting bigger, and no old observations ever  have to be thrown away, even though we keep discarding theories as more observations allow us to eliminate them.

This picture of science as a succession of theoretical explanations of an ever-expanding store of observations remained the dominant understanding of science for a very long time, although it was significantly altered and revised by three developments:  The first was the invention of instruments [microscope, telescope, x-ray machine, etc etc] that rapidly expanded and also changed the nature of the observations.  With these instruments, we could gain information about things that were not apparent to the senses, such as microbes, distant stars, atomic particles.  It required both equipment and extensive training even to make these observations, quite apart from the formulation of theories based on them.  The second development was the mathematicization of scientific explanation and theorizing, which altered the sorts of things that scientists attempted to observe.  The third development, which somewhat undermined the original sharp distinction between observation and theory, was the slow realization that some of the states of affairs being observed could not even be described without assuming the correctness of certain theories.  One could, to be sure, report an experiment simply as the hearing of a certain number of clicking sounds being produced by a Geiger Counter.  But that report was scientifically useless, as an observation, unless it was interpreted as an indication of the presence of a certain number of sub-atomic particles.  But that interpretation necessarily presupposed both a theory of the atom and a theory of the nature of sub-atomic particles, theories which it was supposed to be the role of the observations to confirm or disconfirm.

Despite these developments, whose full implications, of course, are quite far-reaching, the central conviction remained unchanged that science is an ever-expanding body of knowledge and explanation resting on an ever-growing accumulation of observations.

Enter Thomas Kuhn, who in 1962 called this story into question with the publication of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.   If we take a close look at the actual history of the development of modern science, Kuhn argued, we see that it does not exhibit that slow, steady growth that the standard account would lead us to expect.  Instead, we see long periods of what he labeled "normal science," during which things progress incrementally as we would expect, punctuated by brief upheavals during which everything changes rapidly and radically -- scientific revolutions, Kuhn called them.  What happens during these moments of revolutionary transformation is that the old, settled way of conducting scientific investigations is replaced by a new model, a striking new experiment or bit of explanation that comes to serve as a new paradigm.  When this happens, the bright young scientists latch onto the new paradigm and imitate it, doing science in a new way.  The established scientists, by and large, are not refuted or proven wrong, and most of them go on doing science as they always have.  But they die out and do not reproduce themselves, because all the young hotshots are enraptured with the new paradigm.  After a while, things settle down, and normal science goes on, but now along the lines of the new paradigm.

A word about "paradigm," which has become a buzzword in modern discussions but is almost always misunderstood.  A paradigm is a concrete specific instance that serves as a model for imitation.  The most familiar example comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In the Old Testament, we read that God handed down to Moses the Law, which Jews were enjoined to obey and to follow.  The Law was not a paradigm.  It was a set of general commands -- the Thou Shalts and Shalt nots.  But then the Word becomes Flesh in the person of Jesus, the Perfect Man, free of Original Sin, and thenceforth rather than obey the Law His followers are called upon to imitate Him, to take Him as the paradigm of the Good Man, whom we must make ourselves as much like as possible.  Hence the medieval practice of the imitatio cristi, the Imitation of Christ. or, in its modern vulgar trivialization, the bumper sticker WWJD -- "What Would Jesus Do?"

According  to Kuhn, ordinary workaday scientists learn how to do science by studying and reproducing in their laboratories or studies paradigmatic experiments or observations that are taken as the quintessential examples of what it is to do science.  When they craft their own experiments or observations, they consciously or unconsciously imitate these classic examples and thus do science as they have been taught to do it.  But when some transformational figure -- Galileo or Kepler or Newton or Faraday or Watson -- does a totally new experiment or devises a totally new sort of observation that yields surprising, powerful, transformational results, it captivates bright young scientists everywhere who begin to imitate it and stop reproducing the old style of work.

Now, if Kuhn's story about the history of science was correct, and it certainly seemed to be, it had an extraordinary implication that totally upended the standard account of the development of science.  For Kuhn was saying that in each of these scientific revolutions, an entire body of existing observations was cast aside, not as incorrect, but as no longer relevant to science at all.  Once the new paradigm of scientific research replaced the old paradigm, these observations simply dropped out of the base of observations on which scientific theories were erected.

For example, for more than two thousand years, following Aristotle, scientists had been working with such observational categories as "hot" and "cold," "wet" and "dry."  The theory of the elements was couched in these categories -- fire is hot and dry, air is hot and wet, earth is cold and dry, water is cold and wet.  The same system of categories was used to describe the "humours" of the body [phlegm, bile, choler, etc.] and medicine set as its task restoring the proper balance of these humours.  With the seventeenth century mathematicization of Physics, observations of hotness, coldness, wetness, and dryness simply ceased to be considered scientific observations at all.

But the implication of this was that there was no gradually expanding body of observations on which a succession of theories could be tested, and that in turn meant that there was no ground for claiming that scientific knowledge was expanding, as opposed simply to changing.

It certainly looked as though modern science was in some sense better than old-fashioned science, but the clear, simple demonstration of that intuition evaporated with Kuhn's account of the evolution of science as a series of paradigm shifts.

Not long after Kuhn shook up our understanding of science, students of the practice of science noted two other profoundly important ways in which actual science differs from the story told by philosophers of science.  First of all, modern science is done by groups of researchers working together in laboratories under the tutelage or leadership of a senior researcher.  Humanists may work alone as they have for two thousand five hundred years, but not scientists.  This simple fact immediately raised questions about the social organization of science, and sociologists began to examine the social structure of scientific activity in the same way that they were accustomed to examining the social structure of the corporation or the government or the army.

Second, the size and scope of the scientific enterprise exploded, with hundreds of thousand, if not millions, of scientists worldwide doing research and producing reports of their work.  This had a rather unexpected consequence.  Since it had become impossible for anyone to monitor and be aware of all the scientific research being done even in a single branch of science, not every experiment, no matter how properly conducted, was noticed and taken up into the general understanding of the field in which it was carried out.  Students of science as a social enterprise discovered that some experimental reports got noticed, footnoted in the work of other researchers, referenced by yet other researchers, and in that way became, in effect, scientific facts, while other experimental reports, not significantly different in the rigor with which the work had been done or the precision with which that work had been reported, failed to gain notice and simply dropped out of the body of experimental facts on which theories were being erected.

In short, what counted as a scientific fact was, or so it seemed, socially determined, which was to say, SCIENTIFIC FACTS ARE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS.

So there we are with Social Text, Alan Sokal, and Stanley Fish.

Well, all of this pretty much flashed through my mind during the first few minutes of my walk, at which point, more or less when I saw the second Blue Heron, I had to ask myself what I thought about the Sokal hoax and Stanley Fish's attempt to defend the editors for their exhibition of scientific ignorance.

I remained convinced that the editors are horses' asses, not because they think scientific truth is, in some sense, a social construction, but because, if I may allude to Fish's baseball analogy, they are like someone who says, "The thing I really like about baseball is the halftime show."  baseball is a game.  Hence it is, in some pretty simple sense, a social construction.  But anyone who thinks baseball has a halftime show is an idiot, and so is someone who reads the title of Sokal's send-up and thinks it could be a serious, publishable piece of work.

Wyck Godfrey mentions TFIOS with Collider

TFIOS producer talks TFIOS at Comic Con. He says he is heading to Pittsburgh "next week" (note: interview took place last weekend). 

Starts at 7:00.

Source

Josh Boone answers two FAQs on his Tumblr

We've been getting a lot of questions on Twitter about the release date of the film and location information. Thankfully TFIOS director, Josh Boone, answered them on his Tumblr.

 

Like we guessed before, it is hard to predict a release date for TFIOS without having principal photography done. We thank Josh for taking the time to answer these questions. 

source: joshboonemovies

Nat Wolff is already prepping for TFIOS

Nat Wolff, our Isaac, just revealed on twitter that he is already prepping for TFIOS. Check out his tweet below.

Shailene Woodley talks TFIOS and Ansel Elgort with MTV

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies BlogSh

Shailene calls her co-star Ansel Elgort and our Augustus a "special dude" and a "nugget of life". She says Ansel blew everyone away at the audition and she talks a bit about the audition process they went through.

She also raves about TFIOS book saying she would have done anything to be a part of the movie, even if she was an extra.

She says the most important part is that they "actively listen to each other" and that way everything will evolve perfectly. She also mentions that they've already done some hospital visits and will continue to do them.

Check out the rest of the interview in which she talks about her latest movie The Spectacular Now at the source.

THIS ONE DOESN'T COUNT

Blogger, which keeps track of everything, tells me that up to today I had posted 1499 posts on my blog, so technically, this one is the fifteen hundredth, but that calls for something a bit more substantial, which I shall attempt later today.  This is just a note -- a word of appreciation to Papa.  While eating my lemon poppyseed muffin in the Carolina Cafe and after completing the NY TIMES crossword puzzle [difficult today, because it is Friday], I was idly reading a review of a debut novel when I came across this sentence:  "And readers may be left thinking that Ernest Hemingway was right when he wrote in 'The Garden of Eden,' 'Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.'"

That could be my mantra.  It captures perfectly [and simply] what I have spent my entire writing career trying to do.  Hats off to Papa Hemingway, on whatever ghostly fishing boat he may be.

THE GREEKS HAD A NAME FOR IT

"Yes, but what has He done for me lately?"as the religious sceptic might say to the Lord after being told that He sent His Only Begotten Son to save mankind.  The trouble with blogging is that no matter how brilliant you were yesterday, you need to come up with something to say today.  Under this pressure, it is only natural to see accidental conjunctures as divine hints.

Yesterday, as I was intermittently listening to the comments about Anthony Weiner's truly extraordinary press conference, I began reading John Sandford's latest novel in the Lucas Davenport series.  Sandford is a reliable and very successful writer of schlock police procedural fiction somewhat implausibly set in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  I have read a dozen or more of his novels, and find them a completely satisfactory way to waste time.  So what is the connection?

A few words of explanation are called for.  Weiner first.  Anthony Weiner was a New York Congressman of no noticeable accomplishments but with an ego unusually large even for a politician who was discovered to have been "sexting selfies" to huge numbers of women with whom he was totally unacquainted.  I employ the current jargon, unfamiliar as I am with it.  "Sexting" is what Lewis Carroll called a "portmanteau" word, formed in this case by conflating "texting" and "sex."  It is apparently the method of flirtation of choice among the underage crowd with nimble thumbs.  In Weiner's case, the sexting consisted of sending out full frontal nude photos of himself [selfies], followed by lewd messages to those bored or foolish enough to respond.  His most faithful correspondent seems to have been a twenty-two year old woman.  Weiner, we now learn, used the internet handle "Carlos Danger," but the young woman says she knew it was the Congressman all along.  Weiner was finally prevailed upon by his Democratic colleagues in the House to resign, whereupon, as one has come to expect, he sought "therapy" and for a New York minute fell out of the public's sphere of attention.  Now he is back, running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York.  But the day before yesterday, we learned that Carlos Danger was still cyberflashing, by his own admission, at least up until last summer, a year or more after he had "put it all behind him" and "moved on."

And now Sandford.  In Silken Prey, we are introduced early on to the villain, Taryn Grant, a beautiful, rich candidate for the Senate on the Democratic ticket who is described by the omniscient narrator as suffering from "narcissistic personality disorder."  Sandford clearly leans to the left, politically, so it is an act of authorial courage for him to make his villain a pro-choice pro-union Democrat with ... narcissistic personality disorder.

I take it that the conjuncture is now obvious.  What is fascinating about Weiner is his all-consuming limitless narcissism.  What on earth would possess a skinny not particularly good-looking man with a long hooked nose to take nude photographs of himself and then send them to, by one estimate, forty-five thousand women?  He does not seem to have requested nude photos of them in return.  What turns him on, it would seem, is --in Dickenson's lovely phrase -- telling his name the live long day to an admiring bog.  After his original confess-all press conference, in which he vowed to get treatment, he apparently went back to his room and spent hours watching the coverage of his humiliation.  The day after New York magazine published a cover story about his tearful, traumatic rehabilitation, he contacted the twenty-two year old recipient of his nude photos to ask whether she had seen it and what she thought.  At this second press conference, it was clear from his face and body language that he was getting more gratification from being the center of attention than pain from having once again to admit that he was still engaging in "inappropriate behavior."

Psychoanalytically speaking, narcissism is, I think, an unusually early erotic pathology, anterior even to oral or anal fixations.  According to some versions of the myth, Narcissus saw his reflect in in a pool and fell in love with it, dying of a broken heart when he realized that he could not have the object of his affections.  One can only hope that Weiner stumbles across a mirror.

Ben Richardson shares picture of his office in Pittsburgh

TFIOS cinematographer Ben Richardson posted a picture of his office in Pittsburgh on his Instagram. This may be our first look at a possible logo?

Josh Boone shared a similar picture last week. Looks like everyone's working really hard!

Josh Boone answers question about the script and shooting schedule

Our director Josh Boone answered some questions on his tumblr about the script, saying it is "filled almost entirely with beautiful quotes from the book" and about the filming schedule, saying they'll go to Amsterdam in October.

Shailene Woodley talks TFIOS with Huffington Post Live

Shailene is currently promoting her latest movie 'The Spectacular Now' and stopped by the Huffington Post to talk about it. 

She talks about John Green, saying "he's a genius" and that she wrote him a lengthy email saying she's "obsessed with this book" and saying she "would do anything to be a part of it.".

She also says the script contains "lots of truth".

  

(please credit us if you take the video)

TFIOS screenwriters talk about TFIOS and The Spectacular Now

The screenwriters of "The Spectacular Now" and "The Fault In Our Stars," Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter talked to fansites like Page To Premiere about adapting both films for screen, having Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller act out their words and more.

They spoke briefly about TFIOS:

You guys also wrote the screenplay for The Fault in Our Stars and I was wondering since you saws Shailene Woodley work with you’re The Spectacular Now script did you write The Fault in Our Stars script in part to play into Shailene’s strengths?

Writers: No. She was a big fan of the book and our script. It seemed like there was a false story going around that it was predetermined that she was going to be Hazel Grace but she actually did audition and beat out a couple hundred people! I’m not even sure we had met Shailene when we wrote the script for The Fault in Our Stars. It’s great. We love that we are working with her again. She’s fantastic but TFIOS script credit is obviously to an amazing book.

and

Writers: We have been really lucky. We have been doing this run of adaptations and whether it’s Tim Tharp with The Spectacular Now or John Green with The Fault in Our Stars they have all been very supportive and open to what we are doing.

Check out the rest of the insightful interview at PageToPremiere.com

A GOOD READ

Five days ago, Robert Gallagher, a philosopher who teaches at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, sent me an email to which he attached a paper he has published on Aristotle's economic theories.  [Incommensurability in Aristotle's Theory of Reciprocal Justice, in The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20(4), 2012, pp. 667-701].  It would be a wild overstatement to say that this is not my area of expertise.  Prior to reading his article, I knew absolutely nothing about it at all.  A good deal of Gallagher's discussion focuses on the Nichomachean Ethics, and a quick look at my copy shows that at some point I read the relevant passages pretty closely [if marginalia are any indication], but that was maybe sixty years ago, and I haven't been back since.  So Gallagher's discussion was terra nova to me.

At first, I found the essay somewhat impenetrable, but after a while I realized that it was actually extremely suggestive, in at least several different ways.  First of all, Aristotle is struggling to understand economic exchange from the perspective of a slave-owning utterly non-capitalist society, and what emerges from his discussion, and Gallagher's analysis of it, is that economic exchange, for Aristotle, is necessarily an exchange of unequal and incommensurable things between socially unequal individuals.  This makes it difficult to understand how such exchange can exist and be justified.  Aristotle's answer, to put it as simply as I can, is that the stronger and higher status individual loses materially in the exchange but is compensated by receiving honor in return.  Second, Gallagher makes it clear that Aristotle thinks the purpose of society is to supply the wants of those in need.  All of which leads Gallagher to conclude in deliberately dramatic and anachronistic fashion:  "For Aristotle, reciprocity is established through meeting the needs of all parties:  of the lesser for goods, of the superior for honour.  The result is his own, peculiar form of the proposition:  from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." 

As you can imagine, thatmade me sit up and take notice.  This is not quite as titillating as the latest tidbits about Anthony Wiener's rampant narcissism, to be sure, but I recommend the article to you nonetheless.

Josh Boone is currently location scouting in Pittsburgh

He informed us on twitter saying "In a van location scouting with TFIOS team!"

Cast, Crew and John Green react to the casting of Nat Wolff and Laura Dern

John Green to Nat Wolff "You are so great! I am so excited!"

John Green reacts by congratulating Nat and Laura and explaining "I know a lot of you wanted me to play Hazel's mom. I did, too. But when a brilliant Academy Award-nominated actress is interested...yeah."

Screenplay writer Scott Neustadter answered "We tried. @realjohngreen from the screenplay: "Hazel's Mom (tall, brown hair, glasses, male)..."

To which John Green replied "That made me actually laugh out loud."

 Ansel Elgort tweets "Congrats to my main man @natandalex!! I can't wait to start filming! #tfios"

Nat Wolff replies "We're gonna tear Pittsburg up."

Josh Boone commented on his tumblr:

Be sure to follow Nat Wolff, Ansel Elgort, John Green and Scott Neustadter on twitter.

Casting Update: Nat Wolff as Isaac - Laura Dern as Hazel's mother

After Nat Wolff himself hinted so in a previous interview with MTV, it's now for sure that he's been cast as Isaac. Also, Laura Dern has joined the cast as Hazel's mother - exciting!

Here's what Hypable reports:

"Actor Nat Wolff and actress Laura Dern are joining The Fault in Our Stars movie based on the book by John Green.

Wolff will play Isaac, Augustus’ best friend. The actor had hinted at his involvement with the film several weeks ago. He is no stranger to working with director Josh Boone; he starred in his first movie Stuck in Love which hit theaters last month. Wolff had originally auditioned to play Gus..

Dern will play Hazel’s mother. The actress most recently starred in HBO’s Enlightened, which we were sorry to see get canceled after season 2."

source