Category: words

And, more importantly, is this a problem? Anna Solomon: “We’ve internalized the establishment’s dismissal to the point where we can write a book about women, and maybe about children, too, and sex, and then feel pissed off when women and children and sex show up on our covers.”

“Everyone from pop-psych authors to business-school professors to astrologers has come up with her own system for sizing up people. If it were possible, wouldn’t one method have prevailed by now? In fact, two recent paradigm-breaking studies suggest that personality traits can shift slowly yet drastically over time, and quite quickly after therapeutic interventions. This is a legitimate question for theoretical mathematicians, but in the science of personality (unlike mathematics) perception trumps precision most of the time. This fluid state of affairs is often captured best by writers, who tend to have an agenda when delineating characters.”

“As an expert on language and literacy development in children, I’ve talked to many immigrant parents who expect their children to grow up bilingual, only to be surprised that they end up as monolingual English speakers. Meanwhile, foreign language learning opportunities for English speakers are limited. Why is the U.S. so bad at producing bilinguals?” Harvard education professor Catherine Snow suggests three reasons, and argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.

“Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class.” The Common Core and No Child Left Behind were supposed to address this, and it hasn’t worked. Dana Goldstein looks at the reasons why – and at the argument over the two ways to teach writing now in use.

Rita Felski asks what might happen if we looked not “behind the text” but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” In doing so, she seeks to rehabilitate the validity and importance of what we might call “literary desire”: the force that drives you to reread your favorite book yet again; or to finish that work of genre fiction even when you know the ending; or to press a beloved book awkwardly into a distant acquaintance’s hands in hopes that she, too, will come to love what you love and might one day talk with you about it.

“Everything we know about war we know with ‘a man’s voice.’ We are all captives of ‘men’s’ notions and ‘men’s’ sense of war. ‘Men’s’ words. Women are silent. No one but me ever questioned my grandmother. My mother. Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the ‘women’s’ war, but about the ‘men’s.'”

Launched by a Scottish immigrant to Argentina in 1876, the paper became famous for its coverage of the “Dirty War” (1976-83), which the city’s Spanish newspapers wouldn’t touch. Less than a year ago, the Herald had switched to a weekly schedule and laid off most of its employees.

“As we approach 2020, the American words the British invited into their homes are in danger of taking over. It has become possible to imagine a time – 2120 would seem a plausible and arithmetically neat guesstimate – when American English absorbs the British version completely. The child will have eaten its mother, but only because the mother insisted.” Peter Preston blames the telly TV and Netflix.

Geoff Nunberg: “If you’re looking to add a literary touch to your article on pension schemes or emergency contraceptives, you’re not going to get very far with ‘Call me Ishmael.’ But ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ is always available as an elegant replacement for ‘As everybody knows’ when you want to introduce some banal truism.”