This archival video features Vonnegut using a chalkboard and his famous deadpan wit to map out three highly familiar narrative arcs that seem to have lost none of their popularity despite countless iterations.
Category: words
The Art Of Book Acknowledgments (Dreary And Mundane, But Sometimes Quite Revealing)
Some revelations are inadvertent, and not especially flattering to the author. In my head, I have an informal taxonomy of acknowledgments, and one species is the Name-Dropper. Do writers know the kind of insecurity they’re betraying when they do their Trump Towers of thanks, their gold-plated word-piles of self-regard?
Here’s What Happened When A Bot Tried To Write A Harry Potter Book
“After the team at Botnik fed the seven Harry Potter novels through their predictive text keyboard, it came up with a chapter from a new Harry Potter story: ‘Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash’.” Here’s one choice sentence: “He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.”
Merriam-Webster’s 2017 Word Of The Year: ‘Feminism’
Beating out Dictionary.com’s more disheartening choice, “complicit”, “feminism” saw searches spike by 70% over last year – thanks to the Women’s March, #MeToo, and (we’re afraid so) Kellyanne Conway.
Tibet’s Languages Are Disappearing, Says Researcher
The Tibetan Plateau is home to more than a dozen distinct local tongues, many of which come with their own elaborate character systems. Unfortunately, thanks to the growth of internet infrastructure and state-sponsored education, many of these lesser-spoken languages are now on the brink of extinction.
A Short Story Exposes Huge Gaps In The New Universe Of Literary Criticism
In this case, the media has been thrust in the position of the literary critic, drawing lines between the artwork and the broader culture. This isn’t a bad development, exactly—it’s great that a short story is making headlines. But it is also worth noting that the boundaries of literary criticism, at least as they are traditionally conceived, are being exceeded across the internet. The response to “Cat Person” is the latest evidence that we have entered new territory for online criticism, and no one quite knows what to make of it.
A New Translation Of The New Testament Aims To Be As Messy As The Original
“The New Testament, after all, is not a store of ancient wonders like the Hebrew Bible. It’s a grab bag of reportage, rumor, folk memory, and on-the-hoof mysticism produced by regular people, everyday babblers and clunkers, under the pressure of a supremely irregular event – namely, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that, says [David Bentley] Hart, is what it should sound like.” (“Where an author has written bad Greek, writes Hart, “I have written bad English.”)
Why The Bad Sex In Fiction Award Is Just A Bad Idea
“Ultimately, the whole project gives the impression of being based on two simplistic and very flawed premises: 1) you can judge a sex scene ripped from context, and 2) a good sex scene evokes not amusement, disdain, or pity but rather arousal.”
UK Public Library Survey: 100 Libraries Closed Last Year
“The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s annual survey of Great Britain’s libraries paints familiar picture: for the seventh year running, the number of branches and paid staff declined. There are now 3,745 branches remaining in England, Scotland and Wales, down by 105 since 2016, while the number of paid staff has declined by 5% compared with a year ago.”
Science’s Broken Publishing System Abets Junk Science
“Pseudoscience by definition is not supposed to find its way into scientific publications. From peer review to layers of ostensibly expert editorial scrutiny, the barriers to entry for nonsense are high—at least in theory. The reality, however, can differ substantially from the theoretical. Peer review can be porous, in that it allows errors, significant methodological problems, and misconduct into the literature. It also is vulnerable to gaming by researchers who exploit sloppy editorial processes to slip pseudoscience into the literature.”