Category: words

“I don’t usually write about sex. I’m kind of a person who wouldn’t. By the time I’m on page 50 or 60, I sense, ‘Okay, this has been a wonderful fantasy, but stop.’ Something told me not to stop. … I said, ‘No, I want them to have fun. I want them to be sexual.'”

The publications are among the 10,000 titles banned by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a list that includes best sellers like “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “A Time to Kill” and even obscure works, such as the “MapQuest Road Atlas.” Not banned: “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler and books by white nationalists, including David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. They are also prohibited from reading the pop-up edition of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “The Color Purple” and the 1908 Sears, Roebuck catalog.

A set of Orange County business types closed on the purchase pf the alt-weekly on Wednesday; the very same day, the entire editorial staff except one writer was laid off. The new guy in charge says he and the new owners are socially liberal libertarians and that the left-leaning editorial stance of the Weekly won’t change, but …

“In January, when the site moves over to a blockchain, Everipedia will convert IQ scores to a token-based currency, giving all existing editors an allotment proportionate to their IQ—and giving them a real, financial stake in Everipedia. From then on, creating and curating articles will allow users to earn tokens, which act as virtual shares of the platform. To prevent bad actors from trying to cash in with ill-founded or deliberately false articles and edits, Everipedia will force users to put up a token of their own in order to submit. If their work is accepted, they get their token back, plus a little bit for their contribution; if not, they lose their token. The assumption is that other users, motivated by the desire to maintain the site’s value, will actively seek to prevent such efforts.”

“To me, the keystone of the phrase ‘the great American novel’ is not the word American but the word great. Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, ‘a great American’ means a great American man, ‘a great writer’ means a great male writer. … It makes perfect sense to me that I’ve never heard a woman writer say she intended, or wanted, to write the great American novel.”

Lorin Stein, 44, stepped down following an internal investigation by the magazine’s board into complaints from female staffers and freelance writers – an investigation that started when Stein told board members that he was on the notorious online list of “Shitty Media Men.”

“Nothing seems to disturb Egypt’s ruling cadres more than the written word. The recent litany of bans and shutdowns, including blocking hundreds of web pages online, illustrates what Cambridge University’s Khaled Fahmy, a prolific historian of the Middle East, called “an alarmist moment of crisis,” one in which Egypt’s authoritarian state of emergency laws have turned something as simple as reading into a dangerous act.”

“Since [Cassandra Clare’s] City of Bones, which published 10 years ago, authors … have made young adult novels a place where queer love stories feel mainstream rather than an exception to the rule. And they’re about far more than coming out. The new generation of LGBT young-adult literature has room for romance, inclusion and happily-ever-after.”

“Judging someone by their book cover is no longer an option. Every person has a story, and the more people I speak with, the more I see this great human storyline emerging that connects us. I wonder what actually divides us, when there are so many things we have in common. We all want to be seen. We all want to be understood. We all want to be free.”

There were practical reasons for reading books aloud. “Domestic lighting was primitive, and prohibitively expensive. Why strain the eyes with insufficient light and small print when a single person with a well-lit book could do the work of many?” Also, eyeglasses were rare until late in the 18th century, so it made sense for a person with good eyesight to read to people whose eyesight was poor. And reading aloud was a way of entertaining others—including people who were illiterate and could not read for themselves—while they were doing housework.