Category: words

“Someone live-tweeting Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle might preface a description of earlier episodes with ICYMI (in case you missed it). And if the production turns out to be a hot mess, SMH (shaking my head in disapproval) will unquestionably come in handy.”

“During the Cold War, the conflicts that powered the thriller were rooted in ideology: Le Carre’s Berlin and Greene’s Havana were mainly backdrops against which the clash of the superpowers was played out. The new thrillers were not focused on ideology but on place; it was the peeling away of layers of culture and history that gave these novels their impetus.”

“What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro’s novel to pose Big Questions – What is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.”

“Embracing cosmopolitanism is an active process, while the digital environment is often a passive one. The web, by and large, has become an explicitly commercial space. Commercial spaces don’t make people uncomfortable or challenge their assumptions.”

“More than 90% of American public libraries have amassed e-book collections you can read on your iPad, and often even on a Kindle. You don’t have to walk into a branch or risk an overdue fine. And they’re totally free.”

Mehdi Yazdany and Sarvenaz Heraner are no ordinary cabbies: they offer “a mobile reading room and taxi service, complete with chauffeur-librarian.” The cab has more than 40 titles, “from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Charles Bukowski’s Pulp. There are also works by Iranian standouts such as Nader Ebrahimi, Zoya Pirzad and Sohrab Sepehri. … When you pay the fare, you can buy a book.”

George Packer: “Amazon has its own corporate lexicon, its own uses of language. Warehouses are ‘fulfillment centers,’ algorithmic recommendations are ‘personalization.’ I won’t call it Orwellian, because that poor, much-abused term should be reserved for special occasions, like North Korea. But it’s a style conducive to cheerful deception, and Orwell would have seen straight through it.”

The New Republic offers from its archives Max Eastman’s assessment of Death in the Afternoon – in which he suggested that Hemingway’s prose style was the equivalent “of wearing false hair on his chest.” (The new preface to the review recounts Papa H’s response.)

Rebecca Mead: “The distinction partakes of a debased cultural Puritanism, which insists that the only fun to be had with a book is the frivolous kind, or that it’s necessarily a pleasure to read something accessible and easy … [or] that literary works, especially those not written last year, are placed at the opposite pole to fun.”

“The Smithsonian Institution has … [opened] an online transcription center allowing members of the public to help decipher thousands of digitized pages of Civil War diaries, botanical labels, correspondence and other documents that cannot be easily read by a computer.”