Category: words

“To start, the feature will only be available to a random set of users on the service. But if adopted by the platform as a whole, the change will constitute one of the most fundamental changes to Twitter’s core product in years.” Robinson Meyer answers seven questions about the change, such as, “Why would Twitter do such a thing?” (money), “What do 280 characters have to do with money?”, and What does it mean for Twitter’s most (in-)famous user?”

The document is the original printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon, sold to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the church most people know as “Mormon”) by the Community of Christ, the Independence, Missouri-based denomination formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

In 1980, Henry Kissinger (the former US secretary of state and a non-native English speaker, originally from Germany) told Arianna Huffington (the Greek immigrant and entrepreneur/writer who would eventually start The Huffington Post) not to worry about [her] accent, ‘because you can never, in American public life, underestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility’.

In the early 19th century, the young George Moses Horton used to create impromptu poems for students at the University of North Carolina. “He also began publishing more serious poems, like ‘On Liberty and Slavery,’ in newspapers, and in 1829 became the first African-American in the South to publish a book. His efforts to gain freedom through his writing failed. But he was able to buy his time from his owner. … And now, from the archives, comes a previously unknown essay by Horton, which sheds oblique but suggestive light on his possible role in campus controversies over race, power and free speech that sound strikingly similar to those raging today.”

In awarding her its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “the National Book Foundation praised the author of The Shipping News, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and other fiction for her ‘impressive lyricism and wit that captivates readers of all ages.'”

Magazines have sputtered for years, their monopoly on readers and advertising erased by Facebook, Google and more nimble online competitors. But editors and executives said the abrupt churn in the senior leadership ranks signaled that the romance of the business was now yielding to financial realities.

“The good news for publishers, looking forward, is that much of the audience for digital is young. Almost half of those who say they listen to audiobooks were under 35. And it’s a hungry audience. While only 24 percent of Americans say they listened to at least one audio book in 2016, the average listener in that category consumed 15 books in that same period, mostly on a smartphone. You have to figure that the average reader of physical books did not buy 15 books last year, much less read that many.”

Many journalists and media observers have sympathized with Grigoriadis, who appears to have suffered an authors’ worst nightmare—she spent years writing a book only to sustain an unfair skewering at the hands of a reviewer who didn’t appear to fully comprehend the work. But the review of Blurred Lines has itself set off a drama within the halls of the Times, where the hand-wringing this week has been considerable, sources there told me. “It’s being talked about a whole lot,” said one. Another said, “It’s sloppiness, and also a question of whether or not the public response was adequate. It’s a significant error.”

Why is her new, 400-page historical novel a linear piece, complete with a heroine in the Brooklyn Navy Yards during WWII? The author says that’s just the way it worked, and her writing group agreed: “There’s nothing inherently exciting about any narrative move: it’s only exciting if it works, and if it couldn’t be done any other way. Everything else is gimmickry.”

Obviously they’ve all moved to cities, right? But for real: Does “the omission of gay voices in [the] rural canon gesture toward a more pointed claim, that the ‘moral glory’ of the American countryside somehow prevented, or at least denied, the existence of gay men and women”?