As print designer Jordan Wannemacher says, “You have to have a really strong grid, you have to consider the practical physical nature of the package (is there enough room for your hands to hold the pages on the margins? will the type of binding make elements close to the gutter disappear?), you have to design anywhere from 20-200+ unique elements while ensuring they are all cohesive and unified.” — Spine
Category: words
As “The Millions” Is Sold, An Elegy For The Demise Of Book Blogger Culture
While other outlets butted heads over the right to be contemptuous and the still-thriving Gawker published a polemic against smarmy positivity, the Millions sidestepped the debate entirely. The sincerity of the site was singular, and refreshing — although some people remained skeptical. – New York Magazine
Is It Possible To Teach Creative Writing With Value-Neutral Language?
Helen Betya Rubinstein: “I am convinced that we can teach creative writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise. … Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art. Like criticism, it makes us forget what art is for.” — Literary Hub
The Essay As Art Form
The essay is a marginal, even trivial form, yet is also deeply and seriously engaged with the weightiest questions of how a philosophical and political subject can be constituted out of a particular body and mind. Essayistic writing—as opposed to strict autobiography, which may simplify and explain a life through narrative—shows what is at stake when we say “you”: another “I.” – Public Books
The Joys Of Old English (The Secret Is The Kennings)
New Republic cultural critic Josephine Livingstone: “Kennings are essentially portmanteaus, Old English words made of two nouns that have been mashed together to create a new one. … For example, hron means ‘whale.’ Rad means ‘a road,’ or ‘a path.’ Put them together … and you get hronrad, or ‘whale-road,’ which means ‘the sea.’ The ocean is not an empty space, hronrad says — it belongs to the whale.” — The New York Times
What’s The Difference Between A Dialect And A Language?
Okay, so maybe you haven’t spent a lot of time pondering this. But Sam Dresser’s discussion here illuminates something in how we construct systems for communicating. Are the differences mainly in overlap of common words? – Aeon
The Tricky Euphemisms We Use To Judge One Story Better Than Another
“There are objective criticisms you can make, you can point stuff out, but how you decide to rate or value the things done well, how much you penalise the things done less well—it’s a semi-random choice. It’s also hard to distinguish from the exercise of deep prejudice. You can use a softer word than prejudice, like bias, or even turn it into a term of praise—you can call it taste.” – Prospect
The Future Of Publishing? This Should Depress You
Mieke Chew recalls a conversation she had with a Croatian publisher about the decrease in book criticism in the four years she has been doing publicity. “He was like, ‘Yeah, that happened in Croatia ages ago,’ and I said, ‘Well, what happened to all the critics?’ and he said, ‘They have blogs now, which barely fucking anyone reads.’ ” That leaves listicles and best-of roundups in place of a robust conversation around books, Chew says, and, as a result, she’s watched many of her colleagues in the industry run to any internet celebrity they could find to help get their books some attention. “Pandering to influencers is just, like—I’d rather fling myself off a cliff,” she says. – Publishers Weekly
Is There Any Point To Conspiracy Fiction When Conspiracy Theories Have Become Political Weapons?
“[Today,] conspiracy theories are customized to achieve desired political outcomes and then injected into the news stream via social media. … No, with swiftboating, birtherism, voter fraud, anti-vaxxing, Pizzagate, crisis actors, false flags, and alternative facts, the conspiracy theory has clearly been weaponized in the most cynical and partisan way. So where does this leave conspiracy fiction? Well, sort of in the lurch.” — Vulture
A Parliament Of Owls; A Bloat Of Hippos. Where Do These Nouns Of Assemblage Come From?
“While terms like herd, swarm, and pack seem more or less reasonable, others are downright ridiculous — and that’s probably because they were never meant to be taken seriously.” — Quartz