Category: words

“Because I hate myself, and because I want my future robots to remember my contributions to this wild weird world before it all dissipates into the ether, or becomes a wasteland of Russian bots and Incels, I spoke with writers, journalists, novelists, and normal people to come up with a definitive list of essential internet reading. … It comes as no surprise that finding and creating a cohesive understanding of internet writing is just as dubious, problematic, and maddening as the internet itself.” Even so, Lyz Lenz has given it a try – and found some very funny pieces which would probably never have made it into dead-tree print.

“Arguably no single work by Baldwin is as connected to the issues animating Black Lives Matter as his final nonfiction book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), but the work was written long after Baldwin had lost the public’s affection. … Written in response to what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, Baldwin’s book is a piercing examination of anti-black violence in the United States, why it persisted after the ‘gains’ of the civil rights era, and why it would likely continue unless deep-rooted structural and psychic changes occurred.”

Recent controversies over Sally Kohn’s The Opposite of Hate and Amy Chozick’s Chasing Hillary – not to mention Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury – “have raised concerns about the accuracy and standards of published books. … But what anyone who has never published a book might not realize is that the bar for factchecking books during the editing process is low, if it even exists at all. Not only that, it’s common for publishers to never have a conversation with authors about the issue of factchecking and to assume that getting it right is entirely on the author.”

“The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, which has been running since 2000, goes to the novel deemed to best capture the comic spirit of the late PG Wodehouse. … None of the 62 novels submitted for the prize this year ‘prompted unanimous, abundant laughter’, [the judges] said, instead only managing to provoke ‘wry smile[s]’.”

“Akhmatova knew that the secret police might search her apartment and find her writings, so she burnt the paper on which composed drafts of the poem, after learning it by heart. But what if she were arrested and executed? To ensure the survival of her poem, she taught it to her closest female friends who would remember the poem after her own death. She called this situation ‘pre-Gutenberg’ because state terror had forced her and other underground writers to live as if the printing press had never been invented.”

The worn copy of Soul on Ice, with a detached cover and a hole in the title page, had been due at the Eureka Valley branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Dec. 9, 1970, “If SFPL didn’t cap late fees at $10.01, the fine would have been $1,731.70.”

“The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is – at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted,” researchers concluded that the cutoff is later than many experts thought.

“While the threats that climate change poses to material history are well-known and frequently studied, researchers have tended to focus on immovable assets … Archives, because they are technically mobile, have received less attention … Sadly, relocating buildings full of old and fragile documents may be too expensive and complicated to undertake.”

One striking feature in a number of editorships is the manner in which editorial practice shifts towards a more charismatic and singular mode over time. This is certainly a common feature for three of the most successful literary editors of the twentieth century, each of whom edited a long-running publication that was firmly embedded in a parent institution.