“The Sympathizer: A Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen — which tells the story of a Vietnamese undercover communist agent in Los Angeles and the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975 — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Monday, and soon after began winning a very different kind of award: cold hard cash.”
Category: words
Why Shakespeare’s A Star And Cervantes Is… Not So Much
“The English have managed to sell Shakespeare as one of the pillars of their language, because theirs is a more pragmatic country than ours. Spain is not a place that knows how to acknowledge its culture.”
Research: Men Who Are Good Storytellers Are More Attractive Mates
“Storytelling ability appears to increase (a man’s) perceived status, and thus helps men attract long-term partners.”
Los Angeles Library Unveils Its New Library Card, Designed By Shepard Fairey
“Fairey’s design, which he created with artist Cleon Peterson, depicts the historic Central Library in downtown in a white, green and black motif that echoes Fairey’s signature poster style.”
Those Unpublished Neruda Poems They Found Last Year? They’re Pretty Good
“Did Neruda want these to be read by the world? [Translator Forrest] Gander says when he first heard about the new poems he thought they were going to be terrible. Then he read them in Spanish and changed his mind.”
Why Does So Much Arts Criticism Wallow In Personal Struggle? (Who Cares?)
“Contemporary criticism is positively crowded with first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography. Critics don’t simply wrestle with their assigned cultural object; they wrestle with themselves, as well. “
How Word Processers Changed How (And What) Writers Write
“What made word-processing devices much more than just souped-up typewriters was not only that they gave you the ability to edit at the same time that you wrote, or that they eliminated or seriously curtailed the effort of correcting from typewritten pages. Seeing text revealed on a screen, even in the technologically costive form offered by the earliest word processors, provided an unprecedented opportunity to picture the manuscript as a whole and with an immediacy that typewriting didn’t permit.”
Americans Say They Love Their Libraries – So Why Are They Using Them Less?
“According to a new Pew Research study, 76 percent of Americans say that libraries well serve the needs of their community. … Yet on the other hand, fewer and fewer Americans are using the institutions every year.” Why? Investment.
What It’s Like To Work As A New York Times Obit Writer
“All the writers start from scratch with their sources, calling friends and family caught in the midst of funeral planning, scanning yellowed clippings from the paper’s ‘morgue’ archives, and acting as their own fact checkers in the race against the evening’s deadline.”
US Supreme Court Rules Google Books Project Covered By “Fair Use”
“The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers’ claims. That decision today means Google Books won’t have to close up shop or ask book publishers for permission to scan. In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.”