“I had felt prepared for Vancouver. I was a Prince Edward Islander, sure, but one who had suffered under two decades of linguistic nitpicking from my (formerly) Ontarian parents. I never considered that the locals in my new town would even notice I was from out East. All of my parents’ hard work, and still I sounded like some backwater pirate?”
Month: July 2018
Elena Ferrante Explains Why She Will No Longer Use Ellipses
“I used to use them freely; now I don’t use them at all. And yet I like them: in other people’s writing they don’t bother me, even if instead of three dots I find 10 in a row. But at a certain point, my eyes started to fly over those dots, moving on to grab hold of the words as quickly as possible. And in my own writing I began to feel they were flirtatious, like someone batting her eyelashes, mouth slightly open in feigned wonder. Too many graceful winking suspensions, in short.”
Academic Publishing Is Broken. We Need A New System
A global community to coordinate and regain control – to develop a public open-access infrastructure – of research and scholarly communication for the public good is long overdue. The issues of governance and ownership of public research have never been clearer. Another isolated platform will simply replicate the problems of the current journal-based system, including the ‘publish or perish’ mentality that perverts the research process, and the anachronistic evaluation system based on corporate brands.
The 21st-Century Americans Trying To Revive The Medieval Knights Templar
“It is Memorial Day weekend and we are in a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where about 350 members of the autonomous Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem have gathered to mark the 900th birthday of the Knights Templar. Members of the charitable organization, known by the unwieldy abbreviation SMOTJ, regard themselves as spiritual descendants of the original Templars.”
Emojis Are Taking Over. So Is This A New Language?
Emoji, which have grown from an original set of 176 characters to a collection of over 3,000 unique icons, present both opportunities and challenges to the academics who study them. Most agree that the icons are not quite a language—the emoji vocabulary is made up almost entirely of nouns, and there’s no real grammar or syntax to govern their use—but their influence on internet communication is massive. By 2015, half of all comments on Instagram included an emoji.
The Elusive, Enigmatic, Entirely Indispensable Véra Nabokov
As the great illustrator Saul Steinber once put it, “It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir. But it would impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.” Miranda Popkey looks at how and Véra remains so fascinating, despite her strenuous attempts to erase herself.
The Fine Lines Of Translation (What Did That Mean?)
Good translators approach their work in all sorts of different ways. They have egos as big as successful people in any other arena, but the ones I respect are keenly aware of the difference between creativity and appropriation. They might see their work as akin to a curator’s, a librarian’s or a publisher’s. To such people works of art are entrusted — and part of that trust is that they do not alter the objects in their care with inappropriate intrusions of their own personality. There is no little art in mounting the successful museum show, but one would be rightly appalled to find the curator touching up the Rembrandts.
Why Does It Take So Long For Memorials To Get Built In D.C.?
“It took more than three years for the leaders behind a proposed Desert Storm memorial to secure the plot of federal land they want to build their project. The World War I memorial has a site and a winner of a national design competition, but its officials are still tweaking and adjusting their plans to get clearance to build. And then there’s the cautionary tale of the 20 years it will have taken the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial to move from authorization to opening in 2021.” Peggy McGlone looks into the challenges and obstacles.
Athens Was A Wreck. Now It’s Become One Of Europe’s Most Dynamic Cultural Capitals
There are places we live and places we visit, and then there are the other places. Places we return to, where we put down roots, but not strong enough roots to hold us — places that change us, that we haunt and are haunted by. Nowhere embodies this for me more than Athens, a city I’ve watched shift and evolve, endure crisis and chaos and economic collapse, and yet emerge from the wreckage as one of the continent’s most vibrant and significant cultural capitals, more popular than ever as a tourist destination. (Last year Athens welcomed a record 5 million visitors, double the 2012 figure.)
When This Dealer Alerted Poland That He Had Some Nazi-Looted Art, Poland Tried To Prosecute *Him*. Now He’s Suing Poland
“As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.” David D’Arcy recounts the aggravating story of Russian-born American art dealer Alexander Khochinsky, who reported to Poland that his father, a World War II veteran, had left him an 18th-century portrait that had belonged to Poland’s National Museum in Poznan, was stolen by German troops in 1943, and then seized (and kept) by Soviet troops as the Nazis retreated.