Category: words

“He said he wanted no posthumous publications. But on Thursday, more than over 30 years after his death, Michel Foucault had a new book, Confessions of the Flesh, published in France by Gallimard. Foucault’s unfinished investigation into the topic of sexuality in early Christian thought and practice is the fourth book in his History of Sexuality project.”

“Editorial power is an odd thing to dissect because it is extensive and pervasive in some ways and negligible in others. There are a few people in this world who decide who speaks and when and where, and editors are part of that small minority. Not only that, but editors also have power over how someone speaks. That is a massive privilege to hand to some other person. I wouldn’t even let someone else order for me at a restaurant. It involves trust and a measure of faith that is kind of shocking if you think about it.”

Whatever its faults, Grammarly’s Chrome extension isn’t completely useless. It’s saved me from some basic typos in hastily composed tweets and emails, and when I ran a draft of this article through it, it noticed a missing word that I (probably) would have caught on review. Nevertheless, the company’s ostensibly advanced tools are more likely to degrade our writing than improve it, if only because they don’t reflect the ways we really write.

“Los Angeles biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is nearing a deal to buy the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune from their owner, Tronc … The nearly $500-million cash deal, if consummated, would return the Times to local ownership after 18 years and end a tumultuous relationship with its corporate parent in Chicago.”

“Eleven major fixtures of Texas Monthly‘s editorial team have quit since a hedge fund bought the publication for $25 million in October 2016 … According to multiple interviews with former staffers, the environment inside the Austin-based publication is now largely characterized by fear and precariousness, with employees worried about job stability and unsure if they can trust their leadership.”

“There is a quotation from Proust: ‘To release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way of love there must be … the risk of an impossibility’. I think that passion for a lost book, often like love for a person, arises from the impossibility of reading it.”

“When I first became interested in vintage typewriters, collecting them was not a popular hobby. Finding another typewriter collector was almost as difficult as finding the actual machines. But over the past few years, there has been a resurgence of interest in mechanical typewriters—a renaissance of sorts. An object that had been deemed useless after the emergence of computers and relegated to the junk pile is now being celebrated.”

A letter from 30 publishers “argues that the rule change to allow any writer writing in English and published in the UK to enter has restricted the diversity of the prize and led to the domination of American authors since it came into effect in 2014. Previously, the prize only allowed citizens from Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland to enter.”