“We’ve been talking a lot about what it means to embrace newness but also hold on to legacy, hold on to culture, and not erase the actual places that we believe are sacred spaces of the Harlem Renaissance.”
Category: words
The Love/Hate Relationship Authors Have With Their Own Books
“I am so excited when I begin a book. All of that possibility! All of that vision! Then the book hits me in the head with the work ahead of me.”
Why We’re Stuck In A Morass Of Racial Euphemisms
“Some would say that black people have a right to decide what they want to be called, and that that’s all there is to it. However, that answer is incomplete, and risks people merely classifying the matter as one more example of what Steven Pinker has artfully called the “euphemism treadmill.” We can do better than that.”
The 450-Year History Of The True Crime Genre
“Between 1550 and 1700, British authors and printers produced an unprecedented number of publications that reported on capital crimes. As literacy rates expanded and new print technologies emerged, topical leaflets began to circulate among newly literate and semiliterate consumers.” It was a respectable genre, “consumed primarily by literate members of the artisan class and above.”
Is There Anywhere In The US Where People Speak With A ‘Generic’ American Accent?
Well, there are places where people think they do. Linguists may beg to differ.
Oxford Dictionaries Begins Search For World’s Most Disliked English Word
“Kicking off what it hopes will be the largest global survey into people’s language gripes, the dictionary publisher is inviting English speakers around the world to answer a range of language-related questions under the #OneWordMap initiative, starting with the quest to find the least popular English word.” (includes current leading contender)
Let’s Have A Frank Word About Book Reviews
“The nightmare reviewer is the reviewer who has some sort of agenda that precludes him or her responding sincerely to the book. Often that agenda is seeming clever and/or taking someone who has received more than her fair share of attention down a notch. But again, there are people who are just on a different wavelength from you, and it’s not that they misunderstand your book — it’s that they really in their heart of hearts don’t like it. That’s actually fair.”
Bad Puppy! The Alt-Right Clique That Tried To Hijack Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards
The Hugo awards ceremony “only represents tiny, insular, politically motivated cliques taking turns giving their friends awards,” Larry Coreia, a ringleader of the Puppies, argued in 2015. Because of this supposed conspiracy — for which there continues to be no real evidence — he felt justified in helping organize an actual conspiracy of his tiny, insular, politically motivated clique to flood the ballot with conservatives.
Research: Reading Fiction Makes Us More Perceptive
“Habitual engagement with others’ minds — even fictional ones” can bolster the sort of awareness that is essential for empathy, write psychologists David Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research. Their study is published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
The Toothless Old Critics? (Were It Ever Thus)
The decline of intellectual life has been a trope of intellectual life since Socrates, who, Plato tells us, believed writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” More than 2,000 years later, the terms have shifted, but not the argument.