Category: words

“I did not realize that the life I was living was considered in any way provisional or experimental by others: I thought it was just life. And when I wrote a novel about the London I grew up in, I further did not realize that by describing an environment in which people from different places lived relatively peaceably side by side, I was ‘championing’ a situation that was in fact on trial and whose conditions could suddenly be revoked.”

Who knew that after somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million books, movies, TV shows and documentaries about the Nazis, there was something left to learn? “Though elements of this tale have been told, the extent of narcotic consumption by Nazi soldiers and Hitler has surprised even those who have spent decades researching this era.”

Pick your desire – “eye-opening reads” that are “for art-lovers” – and click the buttons, and voila! The app, now in its fourth iteration, provides hours of fun and small quibbles with the creators – and a lot of opportunities to catch up on books readers had missed this year.

“Are big publishers unwilling to take risks any more? Increasingly, ‘risky’ authors, those who’ve been rejected over and over again by traditional publishers or dozens of agents, are being picked up by small presses whose modus operandi is to take risks on literature that is exciting, innovative, or that they deem important either stylistically or politically. Then the big publishers swoop in and profit from the hard work and risk-taking of the small presses.”

The interaction between the right and left hemispheres “enables us to ‘get’ the joke because puns, as a form of word play, complete humor’s basic formula: expectation plus incongruity equals laughter.”

“The online translation tool recently started using a neural network to translate between some of its most popular languages – and the system is now so clever it can do this for language pairs on which it has not been explicitly trained. To do this, it seems to have created its own artificial language.”

“It’s hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things,” he says. “I don’t have them looking over my shoulder any more.” Because, of course, they’re all dead now.

The mother of a biracial high school student on the state’s Eastern Shore told a school board meeting, “I’m not disputing this is great literature. But there is so much racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that, and right now we are a nation divided as it is.”

“While critics and book reviewers may continue to be an essential part of public cultural life, literary theorists who do not embrace AI will be at risk of becoming an exotic species – like the librarians who once used index cards to search for information.”