Category: words

Mary Shelley was a child prodigy, and so much more: “How could a teenager come up with not one but two enduring archetypes: the scientist obsessed by blue-sky research and unable to see it has ethical and social consequences, and the near human he creates?”

“So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries? Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Dong Nguyen at the Alan Turing Institute in London and a few pals, who compare the Urban Dictionary and its content with Wiktionary, another crowdsourced dictionary.”

Literary Twitter erupted; a co-founder of The Toast offered to pay writers if they pulled their articles from Harper’s in protest; writers did – and other publications lined up buy those articles. Madeleine Aggeler reports on how things went down and how the magazine responded.

“After completing its purchase of Rodale Inc. last week, the Hearst Corp., which announced the deal in October, quickly turned around and sold Rodale’s trade book publishing assets to Penguin Random House. Terms of the acquisition, which involves more than 2,000 backlist titles and 100 frontlist books, were not disclosed.”

Traditionally we think of decadence as an excess of self-consciousness; when irony and reflection come to dominate a culture, we are told its faith in itself has been sapped and it has not long to go. But as the conservative intellectual teaches us, it is the lack, rather than the surfeit, of self-reflection that is really fatal. Without it, erudition calcifies into ornament, and the act of thinking itself becomes a mere pretense.

Dan Nosowitz (that would be Dazza to an Ozzie) explains what the sentence “I had an avo sammie in the arvo with my sparky mate Daz at the servo” actually means and why an Australian would formulate it that way.

The hardcover book that costs $18 on Amazon was suddenly free for anyone via WikiLeaks’s Twitter page. The tweet, which includes a link to a PDF file saved on Google Drive, raised questions about possible copyright infringement — and whether those who click on the link and download the free file could face legal troubles.

Macmillan CEO John Sargent: “The person who told me said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ and I said yes, and they said, ‘We have just received a cease-and-desist letter from the president of the United States.’ The reason I was stunned is that it is actually hard to conceive that a sitting president of the United States would issue a cease-and-desist order, because it is extraordinarily unconstitutional.”

Several observers pointed out that the initial five approved venders offered fewer than a hundred books for sale, two dozen of which are coloring books. “Why would they eliminate books?” Garcia asked. “It’s bureaucracy clashing with humanity.”

Topping the fiction chart was John Grisham’s Camino Island, followed by The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Grisham had three books among the top 20 selling fiction books in the year, withThe Rooster Bar landing at #16 and The Whistler at #18.