Category: words

“The small town of Kuşköy, which is tucked into an isolated valley on the rainy, mountainous Black Sea coast, … is remarkable not for how it looks but for how it sounds: here, the roar of the water and the daily calls to prayer are often accompanied by loud, lilting whistles – the distinctive tones of the local language.” (includes sound samples)

Since the turn of the millennium, cli-fi has evolved from a subgenre of science fiction into a class of its own. Unlike traditional sci-fi, its stories seldom focus on imaginary technologies or faraway planets. Instead the pivotal themes are all about Earth, examining the impact of pollution, rising sea levels, and global warming on human civilization. And the genre’s growing presence in college curriculums, as well as its ability to bridge science with the humanities and activism, is making environmental issues more accessible to young readers—proving literature to be a surprisingly valuable tool in collective efforts to address global warming.”

“As a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, [Barry] Newman developed a niche as the ‘King of the A-Hed,’ the front page, below-the-fold feature story that had become one of journalism’s more peculiar corners since its inception in the 1940s. On a front page filled with the dryness of the bond market, the gravity of war casualties or the enduring egotism of Wall Street, the A-Hed was an homage to the ridiculousness of the world, a favorite among readers, reporters and editors, its existence constantly under threat.”

“Waterstones managing director James Daunt, who built the eponymous Daunt Books chain, dubbed Amazon a ‘ruthless, money-making devil’ in 2011. A year later he signed a deal to sell its Kindle ebook reader, but Waterstones has struggled to sell the devices and has reduced the amount of space given over to them in its stores.”

“The idea of perfecting your inner life by reading the right books over the summer was as much a chimera as the idea of the perfect summer.”

“Somehow those pencils and that jar from my last teenage year takes me back to my most elemental self, the same self who learned to write holding a chubby pencil and then graduated to the traditional yellow Dixon Ticonderoga. I switched to black ones somewhere along the line, probably thinking I was too punk rock for a kid’s pencil, probably imagining black pencils were the sort of thing Gertrude Stein would have approved of and Nelson Algren might have liked.”

“Books were the original social media.”

Libraries in Birmingham have posted notices requesting members donate their new and recently-released books, saying they would be “gratefully received”.

“Journalists Luke Harding and Edward Lucas and U.S.-based Russia expert Donald Jensen confirmed to The Moscow Times that they did not know anything about Russian-language books allegedly written by them and produced by Moscow publishing house Algoritm.”