Or really, more than one revolution – and constant revolutions: “Art isn’t easy. It’s not just that we need a revolution in style but also a revolution in audience, distribution, circulation, performance, perception and, indeed, motivation. These revolutions are never a question of being marked as ahead of the times. … Rather, the issue is staying in and with the times and not letting the times drown you.”
Category: words
Children’s Books So White? The New Book Count Is Out
While the population of the U.S. is 38 percent people who identify as African American, Latino, Native American, Asian American, or Pacific Islander, books written or illustrated by people from those categories clocked in at just 427 out of 3,400 children’s books published in 2016.
What Gives Writing Style Guides The Right?
“To accept my definition of style is to concede that for it to assert itself, a number of pretty unusual characteristics have to coexist in one individual. As such, a gifted writer’s style is as irreducible and arbitrarily conferred as any talent; amenable to practice and refinement, sure, but at base as God-given and inimitable as Federer’s touch or Picasso’s hand. Here lies the existential challenge faced by the style guide or writer’s manual: beyond the nuts and bolts of usage and basic writerly manners, they are attempting to teach the unteachable.”
The Original Svengali Was A Conductor, And Other Goodies From The Novel That Gave Us The Word
That novel was Trilby (you may recognize that name as well), which was written as a serial for Harper’s Monthly by George du Maurier (Daphne’s grandfather) in 1894. The title character was a tone-deaf working-class girl whom the conductor-pianist Svengali hypnotized and turned into a world-famous opera singer. As Emma Garman recounts, both of those characters got as far beyond their creator as the monster did with Victor Frankenstein.
Did ‘Goodnight Moon’ Have A Sequel? Yes, Sort Of
In 1950, Margaret Wise Brown wrote, and put away, two fragments that Sarah Lyall describes as “part variation on, part expansion of” her 1944 children’s book , which later became a worldwide bestseller. Lyall tells how those two fragments were found and combined by an editor and will be published this year.
The Russian Library That Costs £100 A Visit
“To enjoy the library’s collection and atmosphere, you have to pay a ticket of just under £100 for a four-hour reading session – a markedly different experience to the free access readers can enjoy in Russia’s public libraries.”
Journalists Are Beginning To Use Bots To Write The News
When Facebook fired the human editors of its Trending module last year and let an algorithm curate the news, the world soon learned (falsely) that Megyn Kelly had been fired from Fox News. “Will there be controversy when the bot thinks this is important, and humans say this is important, and they’re the exact opposite thing? It’s going to get interesting.”
How Wikipedia Is Enlisting An Army To Fight Fake News
“Wikipedia’s role in beating back the post-truth age doesn’t rest with blacklisting certain sources as perpetually unreliable (as the website did with the Daily Mail) or preventing congressional staffers from meddling with their boss’ bios. An elder statesman of the content ecosystem in Internet years, Wikipedia has been combating misinformation by thoughtfully and purposefully iterating on strict guidelines of verifiability that Wikipedians (active editors in the Wikipedia community) both refine and enforce information transparently in open channels.”
Now Open: The World’s Most Expensive Library
Is this in Saudi Arabia or Dubai? No, it’s in Russia – in a new Gothic-style building in St. Petersburg erected and operated by the publishing house Alfaret. A four-hour visit costs 7,000 rubles, just over $120.
When Fiction’s Not Enough (The Arundhati Roy Case For Something New)
Roy’s twenty-year turn to nonfiction makes a compelling case for the need for new forms of writing in conditions of social emergency, forms that remain resistant to commodification.