Blog

My Grandpa Was Part Of The Nazi Language Police

Martin Puchner, Harvard comp lit professor and editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, writes about Rotwelsch — an amalgam of colloquial German, Yiddish, and Romani spoken for centuries by itinerant people in Central Europe and incomprehensible to outsiders — and about how he discovered that his grandfather, a historian named Karl Puchner, had worked with the Nazi regime to suppress Rotwelsch and keep the German language pure. – Literary Hub

Is This The Dream Sheet Music App We’ve Been Waiting For?

“Artificial intelligence experts working with musicologists at a Berlin startup have spent years gathering hundreds of thousands of published scores and creating digital editions of each of them. The Enote app will give musicians the chance to interact with sheet music by instantly transposing it, switching between movements or measures, turning pages, changing the size of scores, and printing them on the go.” – The Guardian

What Intellectual Thought In Silicon Valley Looks Like

In an erudite new book, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” Adrian Daub, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford, investigates the concepts in which Silicon Valley is still staked. He argues that the economic upheavals that start there are “made plausible and made to seem inevitable” by these tightly codified marketing strategies he calls “ideals.” – The New York Times

Remember Those ‘Very Special’ TV Series Episodes? Some Of Them Really Did Change People’s Lives

“Very Special Episodes — i.e., the ones in which a TV series would take a break from its regularly scheduled programming to deal with a difficult or controversial subject (like The Next Generation‘s two-part school shooting arc) — are as old as television itself. Case in point: Leave It to Beaver grappled with divorce, and The Andy Griffith Show tackled alcoholism. But they really took off in the 1970s when TV legend Norman Lear wove the social issues of the era into his numerous prime-time hits.” And, as schlocky as some of them could be, people actually learned from them — a lot. – Mel

Fred Hills, Legendary Editor At McGraw Hill And Simon & Schuster, Dead At 85

“During his four decades in publishing, Mr. Hills brought to market both commercial hits and literary prizewinners and edited more than 50 New York Times best sellers. His stable of authors encompassed an eclectic assortment from multiple genres — Heinrich Böll and Jane Fonda, Justin Kaplan and William Saroyan, Raymond Carver and James MacGregor Burns, Sumner Redstone and Joan Kennedy, Phil Donahue and David Halberstam.” – The New York Times

As Book Reviews Disappear From Mainstream Outlets, A Tennessee Nonprofit Fills The Gap

“Humanities Tennessee [has] created something called Chapter 16: a part-digital, part-print publication that covers literature and literary life in the state by doing what almost any other outlet would — running reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays — but also by doing what almost no other outlet could afford to do: giving away its content for free, not only to readers but to any publication of any kind that wants to reproduce it.” – The New Yorker