Category: words

In a furious article in The Spectator, the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin wrote, “Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’etre as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some.” The publishing house responded, “We firmly believe that giving a platform to more diverse voices will lead to a greater richness of creativity and stories.”

Somewhere on the timeline between the long run of the Oldowan and the more rapid rise of Acheulean technologies, language (or what’s often called protolanguage) likely made its first appearance. Oren Kolodny and his co-author, Shimon Edelman, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, say the overlap is not a coincidence. Rather, they theorize, the emergence of language was predicated on our ancestors’ ability to perform sequence-dependent processes, including the production of complex tools.

The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, a collaboration between the NEA and the Census Bureau, found that 11.7 percent of the U.S. adult population in 2017 — or about 28 million people — had read poetry in the last year. Which admittedly may not seem like much on the surface — until it’s compared with the 6.7 percent found during the last survey period, in 2012.

While he takes responsibility for certain actions that preceded his firing as the chair of the University of British Columbia’s creative writing department, the acclaimed author also believes that what happened to him is unconscionable – not just the abysmal, ham-fisted way in which he believes the university handled the allegations levelled against him, but also the fact that charges he’s insisted all along were groundless have left his reputation in ruins.

Michiko Kakatuni couldn’t stand the lies – the lies coming from the White House about journalists, and a lot more. She says, “It was an evolution of what I did at the Times, where I tried to take part in the conversation of ideas, both in fiction and nonfiction. This was like running a marathon instead of doing a lot of sprints.”

No, but “a more interesting question might have been: was the comic novel ever alive? Is there something distinctive you can point to that can be called ‘comic fiction’? And are those two questions, or a different way of phrasing the same one?”

The NYT has 11 bestseller lists every week and five other ones that are monthly – and that’s rather a lot of work to maintain. The staff who put them together say they consult “tens of thousands” of retailers across the country. “The number of categories and rankings make the lists more useful to our readers, and also make competition between authors more fair. This way a picture book, for example, isn’t going against a cookbook or an adult fiction title.”

Wait, what? “Despite enjoying Grade II-listed status, the property is all but abandoned. The paintwork is cracked, its wooden window frames have been replaced with plastic, and graffiti is scrawled across the walls. An unsightly steel fence runs along one side of the litter-strewn lawn, and a large To Let sign hangs outside. Until recently, the only clue to its historical importance was a small bronze plaque above the entrance.”

Here’s the breakdown: “According to new NEA findings, in the past five years, the number of poetry readers in the United States has almost doubled to a total of 28 million adults. This is the highest number the NEA has seen since 2002. The largest increase in poetry readership in the past five years has come from young people ages 18–24 and African American, Asian American, and other non-white readers.”