Category: words

“Visitors to Mail Online who use Microsoft Edge can now see a statement asserting that ‘this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability’ and ‘has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases’. The message, which is produced by a third-party startup called NewsGuard, tells readers to proceed carefully given that ‘the site regularly publishes content that has damaged reputations, caused widespread alarm, or constituted harassment or invasion of privacy’.” — The Guardian

“Established in 1948 and awarded every two years, the Bollingen Prize is administered by … Yale University’s Beinecke Library and brings a cash award of $165,000. The prize recognizes either the best poetry book of the previous two years or a poet’s lifetime achievement.” With Bernstein, a professor at Penn, it’s “something of both.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jill Lepore: “There’s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?” – The New Yorker

“I have no objection at all to being African, in fact it is all I know how to be and so I cannot possibly be anything else. And so my answer to the question “Are you an African Writer?” was no, and not because I am not proudly African. … I said no because I have increasingly been troubled by the subtle and not-so-subtle constraints that the question implies.” — New Statesman

“At the Edge of Night, by Friedo Lampe, was first published in 1933. … The [Nazi] regime objected to the novel’s inclusion of homoerotic content, and its depiction of an interracial liaison between a black man and a German woman. The book was placed on their list of ‘damaging and undesirable writings’.” Yet it was praised by no less than Hermann Hesse in 1933, and it has gained admirers since the uncensored version was published in Germany in 1999. — The Guardian

Doesn’t translating a work of literature inevitably involve moving things around and altering many of the relations between the words in the original? In which case, either the original’s alleged perfection has been overstated, or the translation is indeed, as pessimists have often supposed, a fine but somewhat flawed copy.  – New York Review of Books

Is it fair to say it’s a mongrel language, drawing influence from all over. So it is important to remember that the formation of English was influenced by a huge range of ethnic and geographical forces. The emerging ‘England’ of this period was a melting pot. – BBC

“[Founded in 1897 and] once known as The Jewish Daily Forward, the [Yiddish] publication first put out supplements in English in the 1980s and started a weekly edition in English in 1990. Since 2017, The Forward has been a monthly magazine. It will continue to publish in both languages online after it stops appearing on newsstands.” Almost a third of the staff, including editor-in-chief Jane Eisner, has been laid off. — The New York Times

“The death of the Forward‘s print edition, and the slashes to its masthead, cap off decades of financial bleeding.” The publisher says the paper has run at a loss since 1945; recent losses have run to $5 million a year. The losses have been covered by drawing down its capital, which had already taken hits from the 2008 crash and Bernie Madoff’s scams. — Jewish Telegraphic Agency