“Forget medals, Wheaties boxes, interviews on Good Morning America, or corporate sponsorships: The ancient Greeks celebrated their Olympic champions with poetry.”
Category: words
London Bookshops Unplug From Internet And Readers Cheer
“A crop of bookshops is rebelling against frenzied online engagement and is creating environments where the real-life, internet-free book browse is the most effective way to expand your social and professional networks. And in countering the internet overload, some stores are proving to be among London’s hottest hangouts.”
The Portrait Of A Novelist On A Completely Different Schedule From The Rest Of The Working World
“After I’m finished working, I always do my exercise, and then I’ll eat something, usually after midnight. The main problem with that routine is all these people who want to do things in the morning.”
A Conversation With Colson Whitehead, Who Won The Oprah Book Club Lottery
“Are you having a good week?”
“Yeah, the best week of my professional career, so.”
How To Survive A Book Emergency (Without An E-reader)
“I called AAA and waited for them to arrive and fix my flat tire. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. And suddenly I realized, to my horror, that I didn’t have any reading material in the car.”
Why Don’t Nonfiction Books Get More – Or, In Some Cases, Any – Fact-Checking?
“People are often surprised to learn that books, those bulky, fact-rich forever things, frequently receive less scrutiny from an independent fact checker than the stories they skim in magazines before tossing them in the recycling bin.”
‘Cloud Atlas’ As Published In US Is ‘Astonishingly Different’ From UK Version
“Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2004, Cloud Atlas is already complicated enough: telling the story of six interlocking lives and hopping back and forth across centuries and genres. But differences between the US and UK editions highlighted by [a professor] in a journal article published on Wednesday on the Open Library of Humanities run to 30 pages of examples.”
Could Software Generate Journalism (Or Even A Good Facsimile Of It)?
“What about telling a story? Not like cookie-cutter data chunks turned into sentences, but a tale with a lot of context and information. Could an algorithm someday write a breezy 2,000-word article like this one? Nobody can currently claim that throne, but one company that appears to be closer to that goal than most is an Israeli firm called Articoolo.”
An Unknown Language Was Discovered Three Years Ago, Hiding In Plain Sight In A Big City – And Now There’s A Race To Save It
The leader of the effort to preserve Hawaiian Sign Language is being led by its last native user. But there are conflicts – cultural and personal as well as practical – making the job even more difficult.
Margaret Atwood Goes To Comic-Con
“One line member tells Atwood she doesn’t know who she is, hasn’t read any of her books, and wants to know which she should start with. The author shoots her that stare. ‘So you want me to say who I am. Well, I’m secretly Glinda the Good Witch in disguise, and the best novel that I wrote is called the Iliad,’ Atwood says, deadpan. ‘What?’ the woman asks.”