The term isn’t actually new – Diana Vreeland coined it for Vogue in the 1960s – but use of it quintupled over the previous year. Other (newer) words in this year’s shortlist included “antifa”, “kompromat”, and “broflake”.
Category: words
Celebrity Book Clubs Are Hokum Writ Large On Instagram
Or they’re both useful AND ridiculous: “I follow the Instagram accounts of all of the book clubs listed … for reading recommendations—and, of course, for their ‘bookish mood posts.’ It’s a colorful and easy way to keep a following; as users browse Instagram on the subway, we’ll scroll across a picture of Witherspoon reading next to the window, in perfect lighting. She just looks like she has a Nature Box subscription and separate moisturizers for morning and evening. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
A Deep Dive On The Culture Of The Comic ‘Dilbert’
Dilbert supposedly depicts work – a kind of Hotel California of work, where you can maybe go home from the office to complain about the office, but you’re coming right back in. But in the last few years … things changed. “The ability to detect irony is increasingly necessary for being alive in America. If you have not by now recognized on your own that the world has been careening through a too-salty first draft of The Onion, there is no helping you. Irony is especially important with Dilbert because the antagonist of Dilbert, at least for the first few decades, was the Pointy-Haired Boss. And there is no other person in the entire public consciousness who is more like the Pointy-Haired Boss than Donald Trump.”
The Editor Who Pulled Joseph Conrad From The Slush Pile
He worried it was one of many Far Eastern potboilers in the pile, but then he started to read. “Indeed, the manuscript seemed to challenge many of the conventions of such books: there was a distinctly antiheroic aspect to its main protagonist, the portraits of the natives ran counter to prevailing stereotypes, and the narrative’s mordant undercurrent was entirely unlike superficially similar works.”
The (Kinda Racist) Secret Identity Of A Comics Book Editor
Turns out the (actual!) white guy who kept getting promoted was also the (not actual!) Japanese guy writing some comics. Marvel’s response is troubling to many comic and graphic novel fans: “Cebulski’s deception calls to mind a longer, more pernicious tradition of white writers posing as people of color for cultural cache. Often, these individuals have adopted Asian identities.”
The 100-Year-Old Writer’s First Live Webchat
Diana Athill is just a few days from her centenary, but – despite some hand injuries that mean she can’t type into a computer – she’s going strong. “Seasoned Athill watchers won’t be surprised to hear that she is at work on a new book – a tale of upward mobility in England as demonstrated through her own family’s rise from country doctors in early 19th-century Yorkshire to wealthy Norfolk landowners. At the centre of the story is her great-grandfather, who was left £44,000 by a grateful patient at a time when doctors were not considered to be gentlemen and such a sum could buy a handsome Queen Anne mansion in a landscaped park.”
The Arts Council Of England Claims Literary Fiction Is In A Freefalling Crisis
Even genre fiction can’t make up for the dramatic decline in reading. “It’s a much more unforgiving ecosystem for authors of literary fiction today. We inevitably end up with a situation where the people best positioned to write literary fiction are those for whom making a living isn’t an imperative. That has an effect on the diversity of who is writing – we are losing voices, and we don’t want to be in that position.”
Charles Dickens May Have Invented The Christmas Feast, But Many Of His Literary Food Sources Are ‘Unclean’ And Meant To Inspire Social Action
The morality of food is a battlefield now, and it was 150 years ago, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, as well: “Dickens’s most abiding influence is his conviction that everybody has the right to sit down together and enjoy the same food. Crucially, the Cratchits’ Christmas was not part of any ecclesiastical or charitable space but enjoyed by a poor family in their own home. Dickens was challenging a culture that regarded food as necessarily exclusive. These are conflicts in a war for status and control, in which food is deployed to show that ‘you are what you eat.'”
Sales Of Literary Fiction Are Plummeting In Britain: Study
“The report [for Arts Council England] analysed sales data from Nielsen BookScan and found that between 2007 and 2011, hardback fiction sales slumped by £10m. Paperback fiction had a more extreme dip, seeing declines almost every year after 2008. In 2011, paperback fiction sales were £162.6m; by 2012, they were £119.8m.”
Why Write Fiction In The Age Of Endless Story?
“As much as we carp about the increasing digitization of our lives, this isn’t really a new problem. Writing required cord-cutting long before the computer. It’s an act of refusal, of relinquishment, and of retreat, a decision to turn away from the world and its noise of possibilities, to chase instead a signal down the quiet of a page. That work—the deep, sustained kind that yields poems and essays and fiction—can only happen in solitude, and in silence. And that’s the trouble.”