From mediabistro.com's FishbowlLA: The Golden Compass writer-director Chris Weitz (left) has complaints about "Hanna Rosin's hatchet job on my film" for The Atlantic, and he tells the editors exactly how he feels. "It has been an interesting experience to be accused, in the same month, of forwarding the aims of a stealth-atheist conspiracy and of selling out the secular ideals of a great work of literature," Weitz reflects (Rosin's article accused him of the latter, while professional offense-taker Bill Donahue bandied about the first charge).

FishbowlLA's Kate Coe notes that Rosin's reply acknowledges she hadn't seen the film while writing that article (though she did review it later, finding much to like though "I pity anyone who has to condense Pullman's ideas into a brief, visual form").

Meanwhile, the Oxford University Press blog has Philip Pullman's new introduction to the OUP Paradise Lost, a swell instance of a modern writer paying tribute to an inspiration. "[Milton] would be remembered still as a poet if he had been executed under the Restoration, and had never begun Paradise Lost," Pullman observes. "But in that great poem he found a theme and a metre that matched every fibre of his genius." This reminds me: I've always wondered what Stanley Fish thinks of His Dark Materials... Maybe when Oxford publishes his latest, Save the World on Your Own Time, later this year, I'll get to ask him! (This Chronicle of Higher Education article will give you an idea of how that book is going to play out.)