Category: words

“A healthy library, like a healthy habitat, is diverse and dynamic. Like species in a rainforest or fishes on a reef, the books on the shelves shift and change, with time and season, so that every week there is something new to discover. A healthy library invites the eye and mind to wander round. This book habitat does not happen on its own – it is created by librarians.”

The voices of some of literature’s more memorable characters have a way of staying with you, long after their stories are over. Many readers — every reader? — could’ve told you that. For some people, though, this idea is a little more literal. According to a new (and truly delightful) psychology study — published in the March edition of the journal Cognition and Consciousness — about a fifth of readers “hear” the voices of fictional characters in their heads, long after they’ve closed the books.

Computers and human readers can identify Shakespeare’s writing through “plus-words”—such as “gentle”, “answer”, “beseech”, “tonight”—which he uses frequently. This method becomes less accurate, though, when writers ape one another’s style as they often did in Elizabethan theatre-land. Early modern playwrights were a close-knit bunch and 16th-century audiences do not appear to have placed a high premium on novelty.

“In an age of texting and tweeting, these folks are trying to keep the mother tongue healthy, and their presence constitutes a refreshing renaissance for a profession that is generally underappreciated and rarely noticed – until, of course, a mistake shows up in print.” Thomas Vinciguerra looks at Mary Norris, John E. McIntyre, and other usage mavens who’ve been getting noticed online.

“How much of this [success] is the movie? How much of this is [Black] Panther’s improved profile right now? How much of this is Between the World and Me? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. What I want people to feel ultimately is that this is part of the entire oeuvre that I put together. I don’t want it to be ‘Ta-Nehisi just took a break and did comics.’ It is not a break for me.”

The current model — big-name writers sharing wealth with unknown counterparts who enjoy the prospect of MFA employment — is a more cooperative arrangement that, while not ideal, has a better chance of ushering into existence quality literature by writers who have a shot at being able to change our lives with words.

Turns out soldiers really did read it for the articles. (Well, not only the articles.) “In fact, it’s hard to overstate how profound a role Playboy played among the millions of American soldiers and civilians stationed in Vietnam throughout the war: as entertainment, yes, but more important as news and, through its extensive letters section, as a sounding board and confessional.”

Last year, the Federal Republic’s supreme court ruled that publishing houses weren’t entitled to up to €300 million in copyright payments they had kept since 2012, and the houses are scrambling madly to get together the cash they must now pay to their authors. The general counsel of Germany’s Publishers and Booksellers Association explains the situation.

The “badass librarians of Timbuktu” aren’t the only ones rescuing irreplaceable old documents from violent destruction. “Soft-spoken, dressed in flowing black robes, [Father Columba Stewart] has spent the past 13 years roaming from the Balkans to the Middle East in an effort to save Christian and Islamic manuscripts threatened by wars, theft, weather – and, lately, the Islamic State.”

The magazine had abandoned print in 2010 but stayed online. But print now seems a viable strategy again. “This isn’t a return to Paste Magazine. We’re not reliant on getting 200,000 people to be part of our rate base so we can go sell ads to Ford, BMW and Jack Daniels. Though we do have some advertising in the quarterly, it’s a small portion of our model. We’re reliant on our subscribers to foot the bill for what we do.”