Category: words

Times are changing, and poets? Well, they draw huge crowds. “The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago, and far more like the demographics of Millennial America. If anything, the current crop of emerging poets anticipates the face of young America 30 years from now.”

This is what the NYT, and everyone, meant by calling him “controversial” – a lot more than a couple of issues. “As much as any single great writer of the 20th century, Naipaul is present in everything he wrote. His life story; his caustic, penetrating, often callous opinions; his cruelty; his genius: All are there, in his novels and nonfiction. Naipaul inflicted extreme psychological abuse on his first wife, Patricia Hale, beat his mistress, and seemed defiantly proud of his racism, misogyny, and toxic political views; to talk about separating the art from the man seems especially futile in his case.”

In a Lexicon Valley episode titled “Wabbit Twacks,” Columbia University linguist John McWhorter applies the analytical tools of his discipline to Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and their fellows. (podcast)

“The festival … has reported a jump in refusals over the last few years. This year, about a dozen individuals had gone through an extremely difficult process to obtain a visa, [director Nick] Barley said. They were from Middle East and African countries, with one author from Belarus.”

Black English is not a degraded variety of the language—it’s an alternate form of English. If a sentence like People be lookin’ at him funny seems unsophisticated because the be isn’t conjugated, try wrapping your head around the fact that the be also expresses, overtly, a nuance that the standard sentence would not—that this looking in question happens on a habitual basis.

“There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them. And although it is a wonderful thing that movies and film can do some of this, too, there is a difference in the quality of immersion that is made possible by entering the articulated thoughts of others. What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different?”

Words matter to me. I am a professional writer, after all. But then Gmail made it tantalizingly easy to say “hi” instead of “hey,” and Google’s prediction, albeit wrong at first, became self-fulfilling. It wasn’t until two weeks after I began using Smart Compose that I realized I had handed over a small part of my identity to an algorithm.

It turns out that many biographers and historians need to eat — and pay rent and buy clothes for their children. Such earthly demands push most scholars into academic jobs at colleges and universities, where they’re rewarded for producing arcane work that remains cloistered in the hallowed halls of academe.The National Endowment for the Humanities is determined to break down those walls. Since 2015, the NEH has been funding the Public Scholar program, an annual series of grants designed to promote the publication of scholarly nonfiction books for a general audience.