First of all, book review podcasts don’t pretend to objectivity. And then there’s the ease of access factor: “It can be daunting for someone who feels like a literary outsider to pick up a 10,000-word piece on three translated works in The New York Review of Books, but not to download a couple episodes of a show you can listen to while you’re cleaning your apartment.”
Category: words
The Massive Burden Of Being ‘Nice’ – And How That Affects Women In Publishing
Wait, though: Maybe niceness is actually the way to go. “I am reticent to embrace an alternative where icy ambivalence or willful disinterest in others is the norm. Though men within publishing frequently exempt themselves from efforts at likability among their peers, nearly everyone in the industry exempts themselves from these efforts when it comes to outsiders. “
Canadian Author, After Weeks Of Protests And Questions, Says He’ll Stop Trying To Speak For The Indigenous Communities
Joseph Boyden got attention for his First Nations ancestry and for his writing about Native peoples for years – but since Dec. 23, the calls for him to be clearer about his specific ancestry and stop claiming to speak for Canada’s aboriginal people have grown clamorous.
The Strangest Things Librarians Have Found In Returned Books
“Inspired by [Claire Fuller’s] Swimming Lessons, we went to the experts in unexpected ephemera and well-loved books – librarians – and asked them to tell us the most interesting thing they’d found in a library book. Their answers delighted, disgusted, and exceeded our wildest expectations. It was hard to pick our favorites, but here they are.”
These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Poems Are So Bad Even I Can’t Answer Them, Says Writer
Sara Holbrook: “These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids’ futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions. … Stop it. Just stop it.” (includes test questions, plus annotations)
Frankenwords: How Mary Shelley’s Novel Gave Us A Prefix We Can’t Stop Using
Katy Waldman: “The prefix we use to talk about human efforts to interfere with nature flips between ‘funny’ and ‘scary’ with ease. Like Shelley’s monster himself, an ungainly patchwork of salvaged parts, it can seem goofy until it doesn’t – until it taps into an abiding anxiety that technology raises in us, a fear of overstepping.”
A Fierce Debate About How Language Is Made (Why All The Passion?)
“Looking back now, it is astounding that the point that has so inflamed my academic critics was my claim that the Pirahãs lacked subordinate clauses. You would have thought I had spit on a crucifix during church. I had, of course, expected someone to point out flaws in my reasoning or to give clear examples of data that I had missed or to conduct field research to test my claims. This is the norm in academic debates. But in the first round of criticisms, lasting for five years, what came my way instead was mainly name-calling.”
Major Publishers Come Under Fire For Far Right Political Books
“Every major publishing house has a conservative imprint — Penguin Random House has two, Sentinel and Crown Forum — and maintains a stable of right-wing authors who may not attend literary festivals or mingle at the National Book Awards but command a sizable audience in red state America. Most mainstream publishers try to claim partisan neutrality and publish books across the political spectrum. But occasionally, publishers get dragged into a political scrum.”
The Vanishing School Librarians Of Philadelphia
“How many full-time, certified librarians would you guess one of the nation’s largest school systems – a district with 220 schools and 134,000 students – employs?” The low number is horrifying – and down by 27% from a year ago and 94% (that’s not a typo) from 2015.
Should Simon And Schuster Be Publishing Alt-Right Hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos’s Book? (A Debate)
Ben Mathis-Lilley: “His project of mainstreaming white nationalism is one that Simon & Schuster should be embarrassed to lend its reputation to.”
Amanda Katz: “The book was acquired by S&S’s conservative imprint Threshold Editions, which has published plenty of other authors and books that lefty readers might find offensive to their values. Yiannopoulos has a big audience. Why shouldn’t they put out his book?”