A high school teacher who does surveys and knows only 15 percent of any class ever reads the entire book thinks that “if reading were less of a spectator sport maybe we’d inhabit a world better informed, more critical—and critical in a reflective rather than a reactive sense—a world shaped more collectively by thoughtfulness, by magnanimity.”
Category: words
World Literature – It’s An Idea As Much As It Is A Reality
“For Goethe, world literature represented the bold ideal of a world in which no single language or nation dominated. World literature was the cultural expression of a political order, one in which the world had moved beyond the nationalism and colonialism that were dominating the 19th century. Goethe knew he would have to convert his contemporaries to the ideal of world literature.”
All The Lies About The Origins Of The Phrase ‘Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire’
“[It] is not the most intuitive of phrases. Although people’s pants do sometimes catch on fire, this correlates more with carrying around accidentally explosive materials than it does with truthfulness. Meanwhile, the vast majority of liars make it through life unscathed by this particular fashion catastrophe. The mystery of the phrase’s origins is compounded by the fact that several of its more popularly reported etymologies are, in fact, lies.” Cara Giaimo gets to the bottom of the matter.
How Trump Bought His Way Onto The NYT Bestseller List With “Art Of The Deal”
O’Donnell recounts buying 1,000 copies of The Art of the Deal to sell in the Plaza’s gift shop—only to be told by fellow executive Steve Hyde that it wasn’t nearly enough. “You’ve got to increase your order,” Hyde told him. “Donald will go nuts if you don’t order more books.” How many more? Four thousand copies, O’Donnell was told. “We were pressured to buy a lot of books,” O’Donnell tells the New Republic. So many, in fact, that he had to find creative ways to get rid of them all. “What we would do is use them as a turn-down service in a hotel,” O’Donnell laughs.
When Roald Dahl’s Publisher Decided He Was Too Much Of A Prick To Publish
Emily Temple recounts the time that Robert Gottlieb had finally had enough. (And “prick” is probably too mild a word.)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says These Seven Books Made Him Smarter
“Nadella, whose own first book, the memoir/vision for the future Hit Refresh, is being published in late September, says that he’s drawn particular inspiration from these seven works on history, economics, technology, and management strategy.”
When Languages Collide: How Creoles Are Born
In this “Lexicon Valley” podcast, linguist John McWhorter talks about how pidgins arise and gradually develop into new languages.
Words, Words, Words. We All Use Them. So We’re All Experts In Poetry
In his new book, “Why Poetry,”Matthew Zapruder makes the bold assertion that understanding poetry requires “forgetting many incorrect things we have learned in school” and accepting “what is right before us on the page.” Any reader can do that, he says, because “we are all experts in words; we have been for a long time. And any word we don’t know we can look up.”
There Are Thousands Of Different Colors – Why Do Most Of Us Have So Few Words For Them (And Some Languages Fewer Than Others)?
“In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. That’s what we have in American English. Maybe if you’re an artist or an interior designer, you know specific meanings for as many as 50 or 100 different words for colors – like turquoise, amber, indigo or taupe. But this is still a tiny fraction of the colors that we can distinguish. … [And] nonindustrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures.” (One language has words only for white, black, and red.) Two cognitive scientists look into why this is.
Foundation Launches New Cash Awards To Support Nonprofit Magazines
“The Whiting Foundation, which annually provides 10 emerging writers with prizes of $50,000 each, has announced a new series of grants designed to ‘acknowledge, reward and encourage’ nonprofit American magazines. The grants for print and digital publications will total up to $120,000.”