Category: words

“As its title suggested, the book was an ‘Appeal’ to ‘The Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to those of the United States of America.’ Yet appeal was a tame word for the prophecy smoldering between its covers, clearly directed towards the nation’s enslaved laborers. The police may have flipped to page 28: ‘It is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.’ Page 35 argued that owners denied slaves education because it would reveal their right to ‘cut his devilish throat from ear to ear, and well do slave-holders know it.'”

It’s embarrassing. Especially for someone like me. I’m supposed to be an author – words are kind of my job. Without reading, I’m not sure who I am. So, it’s been unnerving to realize: I have forgotten how to read – really read – and I’ve been refusing to talk about it out of pride.

Guardian Australia revealed last week that the ABC is breaking up its historic music and reference libraries and making 10 librarians redundant to free up floor space and save on wages. Sources say management plans include packing up all 22,000 books in Sydney and Melbourne – apart from a few “special items” – and sending them to Samoa. The books have been targeted because management wants the library space for the IT division. But insiders have mocked the idea, saying developing countries do not always want discarded books because of the high cost of transporting and storing them as well as question marks over their relevance.

Steven Kurutz, a reporter for The New York Times who now has the entire New York Public Library to look through: “I loved being in a room filled with books. Two rooms, actually. There was a small-town stillness, an atmosphere of benign neglect inside our little library that suggested the great works of Western lit were mine alone to discover. … The persistent feeling that the public library belonged to me, that it was a clean, well-lighted place built and kept open for one reader, was reinforced.”

Romance isn’t pretending not to be about politics. “Romance is political because all art is political, but also specifically because of what it is and who makes it. As the genre grapples with its place in the resistance, it confronts the structures of privilege and exclusion that have shaped the genre for decades. It is a reflection of America, after all, in more ways than one.”

Poets Denise Newman and Hazel White won a grant to collaborate with the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. Then they created a massive collaboration. “Poetry is often so nearly silent, floating on the page, unseen and unheard by the vast majority of people, even those who read. I sense in Newman and White the desire to break down the barriers between poetry and the world, to get out there and chat, even as they undertake brainy inquiries about the nature of beauty and how a seemingly innocent activity, like collecting plants, can conceal human power dynamics.”

With the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays.

On Monday, the magazine/website’s top two editors and one senior reporter – all three of whom were involved in a story about a criminal investigation into Newsweek‘s parent company – were dismissed without warning. Over the week, at least half a dozen writers and editors have resigned – either in protest or because they fear the publication may be imploding.

Matthew Cooper, a senior writer who spent decades at Newsweek and its rival, Time – and who quit Newsweek in despair this week – gives his inside of the title’s decline and fall, “from expensing yachts to chasing The Onion.