Category: words

Says the author of Fire and Fury and Siege: Trump Under Fire, “I’ve said many times: I’m not a Washington reporter. And Washington reporters, they do a great job. They do their job. I approached this as, that the more significant factor here, beyond policy, was buffoonery, psychopathology, random and ad hominem cruelties. In a way, my thesis is that this administration, this character, needed a different kind of writer.” – The New York Times

“For the first generation in U.S. history to do worse than their parents, Oh, the Places You’ll Go is just right: It celebrates young adults’ dreams of escaping from home in the warm embrace of a children’s book they associate with home. … Oh, the Places You’ll Go may not tell us much about the way the world works, but it tells us a lot about how a certain set of Americans wish it worked.” – The Washington Post

It is perhaps this apparent contradiction, between “fiction” and “facts strictly real”, which can seem baffling. Is autofiction fiction, or non-fiction? Autobiography, or novel? There is no easy space for the genre to settle, and the area it occupies remains uncertain. It has always troubled some readers, and it requires if not a new, then a reconsidered, critical response. – Times Literary Supplement

Emphasis on the one. “For Webster, new nationhood provided unique opportunities for language reform — opportunities that would fade quickly, he warns, if not grabbed before America’s language, like Britain’s, deteriorated owing to homegrown ‘corruptions’ such as regional dialects, affectation, nostalgia for English manners and customs, class divisions, and innumerable other evils.” – The Atlantic

Until it went bankrupt in 2015 after its founder was prosecuted for money laundering and fraud, the French company Aristophil held the world’s largest private collection of historic manuscripts. For the past 18 months, auctioneers have been liquidating that collection — but now 900 lots have been withdrawn because they are, in fact, stolen government property. – The Art Newspaper

Kathryn Scanlan found the journal in a bin of unsold items at an estate sale; it covered the years 1968-72. “Over the years, Scanlan ‘edited, arranged, and rearranged’ the contents, the product of which is Aug 9 — Fog. [In this essay,] Scanlan traces the discovery of the diary through the crafting of the finished, fictional volume.” – Publishers Weekly

Libraries step in to fill gaps and offer help when normal channels are inaccessible. Pima County, Arizona, pays for a team of nurses to come to the library to help with medical questions for those who can’t or won’t go to a hospital, clinic, or doctor. In Charleston, West Virginia, librarians told me that they have launched searches for people to research health issues or concerns. In some libraries, librarians have Narcan training. – The Atlantic

When people go on a digital cleanse, detoxing from the poison of too much screen time, one of the first things they do is bury themselves in a book — that is, one to have and to hold, to remind the senses of touching “Pat the Bunny” in infancy, a book to chew on. – The New York Times