Category: words

Storied alt-weeklies like Philadelphia City Paper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Boston Phoenix, Knoxville, Tennessee’s Metro Pulse and its replacement may have shut down.  But last week, Local Independent Online News Publishers reported that it added 19 new members in 15 states. LION now has 160 local news publishers as members in 39 states. So are alt-weeklies dying? Or are they finding a kind of new life online?

Possible? Some are making the case that emojis are the new language. So Paris Review translates a few famous verses into emojis and asks you to guess at a translation.

Thomas Ricks labored over his new book, making it just so. When he was done, his editor hated the result, and harshly told him so. In completely rewriting it, Ricks discovered not only that his editor was right but that he could produce something much better…

The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer, and for decades it sold a weekly version thick with classified ads. Its mix of political and cultural coverage created a model for alternative weeklies around the country, many of which have since folded. In 1996, facing competition from publications like Time Out New York and The New York Press, it changed to free distribution to boost circulation numbers, but gradually it came to rely on ads for sex and escort services for revenue. Under its current ownership, the paper eliminated sex advertising and increased its print distribution to 120,000 copies.

“When African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries. These additions to the main text, often vetted, if not entirely decided, by publishers, are crucial to how it will be received by readers. But when African writers talk about glossaries, we don’t just exchange tips. (How long? How comprehensive? By whom?) We talk about whether to include one at all, whether to offer glosses within the text or omit all glossing entirely. To gloss, or not to gloss? That is the question.”

How did this all get started? Grafton says, “I was reading an Edward Gorey cartoon book called ‘The Gashlycrumb Tinies.’ And that’s little pen-and-ink drawings of Victorian children being done in in various ways. A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil, assaulted by bears. C for Claire, who – you know, and on down the alphabet. I thought, what a keen idea.”

George Guidall’s entire family was in the medical profession, and that was his parents’ plan for him. “But as a self-described ‘fat and antisocial’ child in New Jersey, he discovered acting when a high school English teacher recruited him to play Teddy Roosevelt in ‘Arsenic and Old Lace.'” More than 1300 audiobooks later …

Could the book that initially seems plain wrong to us be precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people?

“On a broader level, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the art of a culture and the psychology of the society that produced it. Furthermore, noting word frequency in published writing does not have a one-to-one correspondence with spoken language in everyday life. Further furthermore, without any contextual information about how these words are used, we just have semantic fragments floating in history’s void, free of any of the things that turn them into actual language.”