Category: words

“We launched the site thinking it would be a good way to find books through your friends. We didn’t fully anticipate the strength of the communities that cropped up, where people were friending not just people they knew in real life but people they had been meeting on the site.”

“Most writers manage to get by because, as the deadline creeps closer, their fear of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fear of turning in something terrible. But I’ve watched a surprising number of young journalists wreck, or nearly wreck, their careers by simply failing to hand in articles.”

Hashem Shaabani, a writer who composed verse (mostly apolitical) in both Persian and Arabic, was convicted by a tribunal last July of “waging war on God” and “spreading corruption on Earth.” He is a member of Iran’s Arab minority and founder of an institute promoting Arab culture; two years ago he confessed on state television to “separatist terrorism.”

Yes, that’s what it says. The scholar who deciphered it compared the runic code it uses, and the small items the code is inscribed on, to text messages.

“We’re at an excitingly early stage in working out how to best produce and provide news in a social world. There are lots of business models that might work; there are also editorial models that look like they work until they don’t. But if you look at the news business as a whole, rather than at individual companies, it’s almost impossible not to be incredibly optimistic.”

“This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability,” writes Gill.

“In the medieval world, news was usually exchanged amid the babble of the marketplace or the tavern, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding. In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning.”

“Poetry is dead by capitalism’s standards—it is not an obvious moneymaking venture, despite traceable employment and readings’ payoffs via the academy—and that emboldens some folks limited by capitalist blinders to herald poetry’s last breath.”

That’s what a newly-translated 3,700-year-old cuneiform tablet says. (There are even instructions for building one.)

“The poet Mathias Svalina is offering an unusual take on the subscription service model. Throughout the month of June, he will write and deliver dreams to everyone that subscribes to his Dream Delivery Service.” (Available only within delivery area.)