“Why on Earth are people still buying a self-help book from 1936? Carnegie’s principles of relentless positivity are right at home in a culture of ingratiation, from the widespread drive to amass online friends by liking their posts (and thence to become an influencer) to the way every interaction with someone in the service industry feels like the prelude to a customer satisfaction survey. His ideas retain a startling currency in a society whose very drives and mores he helped to create.”
Category: words
Poem Signed By Anne Frank Sells For $150,000
The eight-line poem, half of which was copied from a Dutch book of verse, is dated March 28, 1942, shortly before Anne and her family went into hiding from the Netherlands’ wartime Nazi occupiers in a secret apartment in an Amsterdam canal house.
‘An Antidote To Shame’: Garth Greenwell On James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’
“Shame is one of the central subjects of Giovanni’s Room … But that’s not stating it strongly enough: the whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do. … That was the balm of the book when I first read it, the sense it gives that the tragedy it recounts is anything but inevitable.”
The Totally Inspiring Story Of How Two Kenyans Started A Library And A Bookstore
The online store, which Arunga described as “Amazon for Africa, with fewer payment options,” has now sold a thousand books in Kenya and beyond—a relative handful, but, to Williams, a meaningful start. In order to support a full-time employee, he said, the store only needs to sell fifty books a day. And if that happens it could serve as a proof of concept for literary entrepreneurship in the developing world.
Swahili – How A Minor Zanzibar Dialect Became The Lingua Franca Of Half A Continent
An estimated 100 million people speak Swahili – more than French, Turkish, or Korean. And now enthusiasts are trying to spread use of the language all across Africa. (audio)
Research Reveals Six Story Arcs We All Respond To
They examined 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection — all English-language texts between 20,000 and 100,000 words — using three language processing filters. In the end, they found “broad support for the following six emotional arcs…”
So What Exactly *Is* ‘Longform Journalism’? It’s Not Just A Word Count
Brendan Fitzgerald considers, and questions, the taxonomy: “such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. … Whether labels like ‘longform’ reward a story is another matter.”
Universal Translator? An Expert Weighs In On The Challenges
“I am a professional translator, having translated some 125 books from the French. One might therefore expect me to bristle at Google’s claim that its new translation engine is almost as good as a human translator, scoring 5.0 on a scale of 0 to 6, whereas humans average 5.1. But I’m also a PhD in mathematics who has developed software that ‘reads’ European newspapers in four languages and categorises the results by topic. So, rather than be defensive about the possibility of being replaced by a machine translator, I am aware of the remarkable feats of which machines are capable, and full of admiration for the technical complexity and virtuosity of Google’s work. My admiration does not blind me to the shortcomings of machine translation, however.”
They’re Here! The Finalists For The 2016 Bad Sex In Fiction Award
None of these six nominees are as bad as the ghastly passage that won Morrissey the trophy last year, but nevertheless … (includes explanation of why Donald Trump was disqualified from the contest)
The Founding Novelist Of Israeli Literature (Even Israelis Have Trouble Reading Him)
S. Y. Agnon, the only Israeli writer to win a Nobel, has never broken through to an international audience. Yet even present-day Israelis, who can read his Hebrew perfectly well, no longer have all the common knowledge required to comprehend Agnon’s work – and the ones that do likely avoid it on principle.