“[Wigtown] is Scotland’s national book town, its Hay-on-Wye. With a dozen used bookstores tucked into its small downtown, it is a literary traveler’s Elysium. Best of all, Wigtown offers a literary experience unlike any other I’m aware of. In town there is a good used bookstore called the Open Book, with an apartment up above, that’s rentable by the week. Once you move in, the shop is yours to run as you see fit.” And, for one day, that’s what Dwight Garner did.
Category: words
Why The Spanish Monks And Nuns Of The New World Branded Their Books
No, that doesn’t mean they tried to be savvy marketers: they marked their books with hot branding irons. And these marcas de fuego weren’t put on the cover, binding, or frontispiece; they were burned onto the sides of the pages as the books were held shut. Jessica Leigh Hester gives us the background.
In His Head, He Was Constantly Panning It: When A New Yorker Book Critic Writes A Novel Of His Own
James Wood: “I find I can’t turn off the critical monitor quite how I would like to. … Perhaps I’ve reconciled myself to that inability, but I’ve come to the conclusion that that isn’t such a bad thing, that maintaining a critical consciousness at least enables me to review myself, edit myself, think twice and three times about everything I’m doing. … I found it to be sort of an intensely self-critical activity. So yeah, I was constantly writing my worst possible reviews.”
Survey: Professional Writers Now Earn Less Than Minimum Wage In The UK
The latest report by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), due to be published on Thursday, shows median earnings for professional writers have plummeted by 42% since 2005 to under £10,500 a year, well below the minimum annual income of £17,900 recommended by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Women fare worse, according to the survey, earning 75% of what their male counterparts do, a 3% drop since 2013 when the last ALCS survey was conducted. Based on a standard 35-hour week, the average full-time writer earns only £5.73 per hour, £2 less than the UK minimum wage for those over 25. As a result, the number of professional writers whose income comes solely from writing has plummeted to just 13%, down from 40% in 2005.
Exclamation Point Inflation: How ! Got To Be Like The Word ‘Awesome’
“Much like awesome once served a greater purpose, the exclamation point has been downgraded from a shout of alarm or intensity to a symbol that indicates politeness and friendliness.” As email etiquette mavens David Shipley and Will Schwalbe put it, “The exclamation point is a lazy but effective way to combat email’s essential lack of tone.”
Words Matter: Why Ayn Rand Is Still A Bestseller (And How To Deal With It)
Hoping that Rand’s ideas will, in time, just go away is not a good solution to the problem. The Fountainhead is still a bestseller, 75 years since first publication. And perhaps it’s time to admit that Rand is a philosopher – just not a very good one. It should be easy to show what is wrong with her thinking, and also to recognise, as John Stuart Mill did in On Liberty (1859), that a largely mistaken position can still contain some small elements of truth, as well as serving as a stimulus to thought by provoking us to demonstrate what is wrong with it.
How Subatomic Physics Is Helping To Read The Ancient Scrolls Carbonized By Mount Vesuvius
“The scrolls [from Herculaneum] represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. … Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal. Over the years, various attempts to open some of them created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed. And it probably would have remained that way except for an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky.”
Trying To Catalog Every Language In India (There Are 780 So Far)
“[Ganesh] Devy, a former professor of English from the western state of Gujarat, launched the People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010. … With single-minded ambition, he put together a team of 3,000 volunteers from all parts of the country. Since 2013, the PLSI has published 37 volumes, featuring detailed profiles of each of India’s languages. The project is expected to be completed by 2020 with 50 volumes.” Sunaina Kumar reports on how Devy and his team do their work and what they’ve discovered.
Some Bilingual Authors Argue We Should Stop Putting Non-English Words In Italics
“The format is meant to be used for clarity, to indicate to a reader that she hasn’t come across a typo or an English word she doesn’t know. But the practice reinforces a monolinguistic culture of othering, some writers believe, and it simply doesn’t sound natural. For the world’s bilingual population — by some estimates, more than half — it’s not the way people really talk.”
A Rapper Wins The Orwell Prize For Political Books
“Scottish rapper Darren McGarvey, who performs under the name Loki, has won the Orwell prize for political books for his searing examination of poverty in Britain, Poverty Safari.”