Category: words

The oddest finding may be the sharp increase in an innocuous little word: “and.” In 1946, “and” accounted for around 2.6 percent of the words in the reports, a frequency similar to that of average academic prose. But by 2015, as this chart shows, its share had almost doubled, reflecting what the researchers describe as the growing tendency toward long lists of nouns that create the illusion of activity, sometimes despite a “total absence of logic.”

Literary criticism typically tends to emphasize the singularity of exceptional works that have stood the test of time. But the canon, Franco Moretti argues, is a distorted sample. Instead, he says, scholars need to consider the tens of thousands of books that have been forgotten, a task that computer algorithms and enormous digitized databases have now made possible. “We know how to read texts,” he wrote in a much-quoted essay included in his book “Distant Reading,” which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. “Now let’s learn how to not read them.”

“While I never intended to become The Angriest Librarian, a lifelong inability to hold my tongue—and my frustration with the permeating stereotypes of 1950s-era public libraries—seems to have made it inevitable. So, when I was confronted with yet another blowhard who couldn’t see the value his tax dollars were placing right in front of his face, I had no choice. Over the next few days, I picked up 15,000 followers and found myself in a position to become a public face for my besieged profession.”

“The New York Public Library, for instance, has not only cuneiform tablets and ninth-century gospels, but also a Gutenberg Bible and a copy of The Bay Psalm Book, one of the oldest books printed in America. In addition to its own cuneiform tablets and Gutenberg Bible, the Library of Congress holds one of the oldest examples of printing in the world, passages from a Buddhist sutra, printed in A.D. 770, as well as a medieval manuscript from 1150, delightfully titled Exposicio Mistica Super Exod.”

The Roman emperor Nero is the archetypal example of a despot who sees himself as a master of verse; his example was followed by no less than (among others) Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot (he loved the French Symbolists), Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. And these rulers tended to stick closely to classical forms. Benjamin Ramm explores the link between ruthlessness and versification.

“It turns out, machines can be pretty damn good at spinning up a tale of murder, dread, despair, and supernatural terror. At least one is—Shelley A.I., a horror-writing bot created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, debuting just in time for Halloween this year. Named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, the little horror-author-that-could is a deep learning algorithm that reads stories published in terror-inducing /r/nosleep subreddit and trains itself to write its own horror fiction.”

“It seems it is only a matter of time before there is an award for the best award – as if no Canadian author or publishing house should be left out in the cold.”

First of all, writers, you really are not going to clean the house. Don’t do it. Stop it. “If you’re not making the time to write, no other advice can help you.”

Despite two highly autobiographical books and a new movie about her, Didio “isn’t fully a celebrity. She isn’t fully an author, in the modern way of it. To be an author, today, is generally to be required, repeatedly, to acquiesce: to give in to demands of omnipresence, of performative relatability. To live-tweet The Bachelor. To write op-eds in the Times. To accept that being part of the zeitgeist requires that one first accept the terms of geistiness: disembodied, environmental, miasmic. To be an author, today, is in some part to sacrifice oneself.”

Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing, says it’s not easy to recreate the feel of writing her first novel, which she wrote in a dank little apartment in Iowa City. “Every day I would wake up in the dungeon, head to my nook, sit at my desk and feel proud and productive and contented. I’m trying to recapture that feeling.”