Category: words

English has lost more students than other subjects. Undergraduate enrollments on English degrees have also fallen: from an all-time high of around 51,000 in 2011/12 to 39,000 last year, although the proportion of English A-level students who go on to study it at university has hovered around 14% for a decade. It makes sense to view the decline of English studies as part of a bigger, international story about the weakening of the humanities, and its counterpoint: the rise in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). – The Guardian

Holy hell. Quick recap: “We got a Talented Mr. Grifter story about a best-selling novelist, a plagiarism scandal involving the former editor of the biggest and most reputable paper in the country, and a blackmail saga involving dick pics.” – Vulture

Reading doesn’t quite go with our everyday understanding of time. “It’s incommensurate but parallel: books unspool their own chronology of plot, intersecting our own lives, but in complicated ways. They fit into our days but they also stretch out alongside, cutting across everyday time, work time, social time, and lifetimes. .. We make time for books, but they in turn make time for us, generating rhythms that punctuate lives.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

The future, and present, of fiction is cli-fi – books about what humans do while, and after, we change the climate. “We need to show people what life will look like under current and future climate-change conditions, and to share ideas about how to mitigate those conditions. We know that people are more likely to absorb information from stories than from data and lectures.” – The Millions

So, to quote a great movie whose screenwriter had also written the book, stop saying that! “The reality is that if 76% of any population is participating in a single activity then you are surrounded by people doing that very thing. The article said that books are dying; the research said—to me, at least—that we are a nation of readers.” – Time

Dani Shapiro: “This is my 10th book. Writing it, I was confronted with all of my past writer selves, and all the books that writer wrote. … In my early novels, and as recently as in Still Writing (2013), I found passages about family secrets and lies, about snooping through my parents’ things.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Seth Marko, co-owner of the Book Catapult in San Diego, came home from a winter convention with chest pains and went straight to the hospital; his wife/co-owner had to help with his recovery, and the only full-time staffer came home from the same convention with bird flu. So the owners of four other San Diego bookstores (plus a bookseller couple from Los Angeles) pitched in to staff the Catapult rather than allowing it to close. — Publishers Weekly

Three senior designers at publishing houses talk about the process of conceiving and trying out different designs, then choosing the one they think works best. — The New York Times