Category: words

“Before this phone call, it had never occurred to Kirkpatrick that her contest winner might have spent the past 25 years in prison, where he’s serving a life sentence for murder.”

Janice Min transformed The Hollywood Reporter. Can she work the same magic on a trade magazine that used to have all of the power in the music biz?

Seriously bad news: The Nook division over the holidays saw “a 60.5 percent drop compared with the nine-week holiday period a year earlier. Barnes & Noble executives said their total share of the e-book market had fallen to 20 percent.”

The medievalist who compressed Beowulf into 100 tweets says it “forced me back to the Old English to try and capture, in the shortest possible length, what I thought were the essential components of the poem.”

“We love the speed and community of the Internet, but there’s so much noise. … We wanted an opportunity to give some pieces a second life, one that won’t be lost to Google searches.”

“In a contemporary, literary twist on old homesteading incentives, a new nonprofit organization called Write a House is refurbishing three two-bedroom houses in Detroit and accepting applications this spring for writers to move in, rent free. Poets, journalists, novelists, and anyone who falls somewhere in between are encouraged to apply.”

“The Library of Congress staff tried to figure out some way to address the Park Service’s concerns, but ultimately, no feasible compromise was reached. More than 200,000 people attended last year’s two-day literary event.”

“Literary misery was highest in the 1940s, they found, with the 1980s narrowly in second place, and the 1920s in third. Their research, published yesterday in PLOS ONE, found that an increase in frequency of miserable language in these decades correlated to the economic misery of the respective previous decades.”

“Are lists overused? Probably. Useful things often are, and lists are really, really useful. Here’s why we like ‘em, and why they probably won’t — and probably shouldn’t — go anywhere soon.”

A technique called statistical stylometry, which mathematically examines the use of words and grammar, was found to be “surprisingly effective” in determining how popular a book would be.