“This is a bad time for my species — and a bad time for the study of English. In academe, we are witnessing an extinction of fields of study once thought essential. I teach at a private university that has just canceled majors in English, religious studies, philosophy, and music. The English major is becoming the useless gentleman, the Charles Smithson, of the modern university.”
Category: words
Roxane Gay, Henry Louis Gates, Margaret Atwood, Hillary Clinton, And Others On The Words That Mattered In 2017
Truth (Gay), roots (Gates), belief (Atwood), empathy (Clinton), ally (Ana Marie Cox), gaslight (Carmen Maria Machado), crossroads (Ellen Pao), collusion (Mitch & Freada Kapor), and others.
García Márquez’s Archive Is Now Available Online – For Free
“The online archive, which is catalogued both in English and in Spanish, includes drafts and other material relating to all of García Márquez’s major books, … [as well as] previously unseen photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, screenplays and personal ephemera, like a collection of his passports. Many archives are digitizing their holdings. But to make so much material from a writer whose work is still under copyright freely available online is unusual.”
How We Use “Um” To Control Our Conversation
Things like “ums” and “uhs” signal there’s some delay in processing. But as a speaker, what I can do is exploit those kinds of signals. I can use them dishonestly. I can use something like “um” to give the overt signal that I’m having some sort of trouble with processing, but in reality, all I’m doing is trying to claim more ground and get you to keep waiting for me to finish.
Is The Internet Making Us Into Worse Writers?
“It is difficult to prove that digital technologies are actually making people into worse writers. It is likely that the world is just seeing more unfiltered thoughts written down than at any other time in history. People are not writing worse so much as writing and publishing far more. But the internet is changing language.”
The 25 Most-Read New Yorker Stories Of 2017
How an earthquake would kill the Pacific Northwest leads the list.
Here’s What Science Fiction Written By Artificial Intelligence Looks Like
Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common.
What Translators Do For Us
Translating literature is not always more difficult than translating other texts—tourist brochures, technical manuals, art catalogues, sales contracts, and the like. But it does have this distinguishing characteristic: its sense is not limited to a simple function of informing or persuading, but rather thrives on a superabundance of possible meanings, an openness to interpretation, an invitation to measure what is described against our experience. This is stimulating.
A Magazine For Southeast Asia’s Literary Scene Strives To Produce Sharp Political Commentary – And Avoid Censorship
The Mekong Review is published out of Sydney, partly to avoid some censorship, and despite a tiny staff and a patchy delivery system, it’s doing well: “The magazine punches above its weight: Its contributors include some of the best-known authors, journalists and academics who follow the region, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and Emma Larkin, the pseudonym for a Bangkok-based American writer who has published several nonfiction books on Myanmar.”
A Study Says Reading Aloud Usually Helps Humans Remember Better
Involving more senses probably helps. “The authors suggest that reading things aloud involves different types of processing, which makes it more active and engages us more than reading silently.”