“Recent initiatives by the European Commission as well as Irish and English governments begin to recognise an alarming state of affairs for the contemporary writer. A European Commission report indicates that Irish and British writers are disadvantaged compared to some of their Euroland brethren. In Ireland a controversial pilot scheme announced in June acknowledges Irish writers as self-employed and thus permitted to seek jobseeker’s allowance. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council of England (ACE) has told of its “concerns that something significant is occurring” in the realm of literature.”
Category: words
Do Languages Simplify Over Time?
That’s the theory, based on what we see with languages such as english, which seem to slim down over centuries. John McWhorter says that simply isn’t true.
What Jane Austen Has To Offer Straight Guys
William Deresiewicz, who began his career as an Austen scholar, has spent his adult life dealing with people’s surprise (if not more) at his choice of specialty. “Men, in particular, would get this look in their eyes, as if to say, ‘What’s wrong with you, dude?'”, while women often seemed to act as if he was intruding into a domain that was theirs (in a way that, say, George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or the Brontës are not). Here Deresiewicz considers what it is about Austen that would make women feel so possessive, what makes an Austen hero sexy, and how her novels taught him “how to be a better man.”
The Immigrant Experience, Told In Six Words
Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gary Shteyngart, Madeleine Albright, David Henry Hwang, and others share their (very succinct) stories.
What It’s Like To Write A Book When You’ve Had A Traumatic Brain Injury
“In the back corner of the shed were two big X [Google: ‘the thing you bang on in a band to make the beat’ :::: drums] full of what looked like broken-up pieces of metal about the size of cheese snack X [Google: ‘cheese square snack’ :::: crackers].”
New York Daily News Sold To Tronc For $1
“Tronc, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, announced on Monday that it had acquired The Daily News, the nearly 100-year-old tabloid that for decades set the city’s agenda with its gossip, sports and city coverage.”
The New Historicism Of Vagueness (Or Some Such)
Greenblatt and company treated “culture as text”; they challenged such concepts as originality, genius, aesthetic merit, “the classics,” the canon, and “major works” vs. “minor works”; and even as they sought to upend conventional approaches to literary criticism, they sought, too, to overturn what they saw as old-fashioned approaches to the telling of history, producing “counterhistories” that would amount to “assaults on the grands récits inherited from the last century.”
Billy – The Story Behind IKEA’s Ubiquitous Bookcase
“It’s the archetypal IKEA product. It was dreamed up in 1978 by an IKEA designer named Gillis Lundgren. He sketched it on the back of a napkin, worried that he’d forget it. Now there are sixty-odd million in the world, nearly one for every hundred people.”
Why Have These New Science Books Become So Popular?
“The single most important element seems to be the ability to inspire awe. In 2010, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined the New York Times’s list of most shared articles and deduced that readers sought an ’emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation even in the face of something greater than the self’. Physics, and astrophysics in particular, seem well suited to this, but only a rare group of individuals has the ability, or the inclination, to bring about transcendence.”
Can We Consider Some Speech Violence?
“For people who occupy positions of power in society, there may not be a single word they would ever consider violence. But that doesn’t mean other people can’t legitimately experience some speech as violence. And when people say they do experience language as violence, it’s not because they’ve confused speech with physical assault; it’s because the language-game in which the speech-act takes place is different.”