Fiction about the nation’s capital is a growth that flourishes only on the lower slopes of Parnassus. Think of the flower of our novelists—Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Bellow—and see if you can call to mind a single scene that is set on the banks of the Potomac. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
We have no heroes like Shatner, just ourselves and our proud tradition of judging and promoting the images and ideograms of language — and our totally imaginary convention. That should be enough, but a love for punctuation, signage and graphic symbols remains a lonely passion. It’s hard not to be bitter. <<<To read more, click here.>>>
Shortly after my book Oprah: A Biography was published last April, one of Oprah Winfrey’s open-minded fans wrote to her website saying she wanted to read the book. Oprah’s message-board moderator hurled a thunderbolt in response: “This book is an unauthorized biography.” The word unauthorized clanged on the screen like a burglar alarm. Suddenly I heard the rumble of thousands of Oprah book buyers charging out of Barnes & Noble—empty-handed. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Flying into Provincetown on an eight-seat prop plane, you see what Norman Mailer meant when he wrote the preface to Are We in Vietnam? — “In Provincetown, geography runs out, and you are surrounded by the sea. So it is a strange place.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“We are our narratives” has become a popular slogan. “We” refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. “Narratives” refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” he wrote. “Well, she says it’s ‘I COULD care less.’ ” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1810, the Grimm Brothers first wrote down the story of Snow White, as told to them by some anonymous German folks. I’ve read this story countless times since discovering it in my adolescence. Even so, it’s the Disney version, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that is the definitive Snow White story for me, though I hadn’t seen it since I was a child. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
‘I am a bit angry’, said the Swedish literary critic Ulrika Milles during Swedish television’s broadcast of the announcement of the Nobel Prize in literature for 2010. It took the country’s cultural elite just seconds to realize that a mistake had been made in the Swedish Academy’s voting process: you see, Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner, is no longer a socialist. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Everything I know about cutting grass I learned from my father. He had three rules and one quasi-rule. The three rules undoubtedly reflected his occupation as a systems analyst. Rule 1: To maximize efficiency and, thus, save energy, plot the yard into squares and mow inward from the outer edge. Rule 2: To prevent the engine from overworking and, thus, save gas, always position the discharge chute away from the square. Rule 3: To extend the life of the mower and, thus, save money, always service the machine according to the manufacturer’s specifications. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Employed as he is by the royal household, the laureate is obliged to write poems about the royal family, a practice that makes him an easy target for what Alfred Lord Tennyson, a laureate himself, called the “parasitic animalcules of the press”. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I was raised on words. They tumbled off the kitchen table onto the floor where I sat: grandfather, uncles, and refugees flung Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, and what passed for English at one another in a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation. Sententious flotsam from the Edwardian-era Socialist Party of Great Britain hung around our kitchen promoting the True Cause. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1952, the landscape of American fiction was dominated by a group of literary celebrities who had published their first novels after or near the end of World War II. James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Gore Vidal: these were the up-and-comers about whom everyone was talking in the days when serious fiction still mattered to the educated public, the ones who were expected to do great things. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to die out by the end of this century. Now, one man is trying to keep those voices alive by reigniting local pride in heritage and identity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When I first moved to Kyoto in 1999, I knew about 50 words of Japanese. My attempts to string together a few broken phrases were met with excessive praise, and I assumed everyone was being nice. “No,” I remember my friend Yuki saying. “People mean it. They really are impressed.” She was referring to the widespread belief that Japanese, with its nuanced formal expressions and three different writing systems, is a uniquely complex language. How could a foreigner possibly learn it? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
But early on in his studies, Petrarch identified a very basic problem. To appreciate classical literature and history, he realized, he needed to understand the geographical context in which they had been written and had taken place. This presented a host of difficulties. How could one study a history of the Roman campaigns in Gaul, for example, without knowing what the ancients had considered Gaul to be? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Cook as vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The extinction of the narrative may be ruining civilization, Ben MacIntyre explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains. That’s the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing–out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jaroslaw Anders’s Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language. Granted, the field of nonscholarly books that synopsize modern Polish literature is admittedly narrow, so such praise may sound slight, a little like Spinal Tap exclaiming that they’re huge in Japan. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted. Actually, journalists deserve low pay. Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days. Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. In his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Crawford asks us to look around in the field of which we toil, be it advertising, finance, or consulting. Who really gets to face new problems and make decisions based on their knowledge and instincts, and who is just another clerk, following instructions? <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Alive! The word pops into my head as we enter Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo Airport. Ironic really, isn’t it, for a country with one of the highest crime rates in the world? Yet I feel it. Sense it. Am reminded of a friend who says he comes alive every time he returns – feels boring, bland and disconnected for weeks in his new country, Australia every time he goes back. With the recent elections having taken place in South Africa, it is time to examine this country I call home. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Exclamation marks – those forms of punctuation derided by the funless and fastidious – are making a comeback, thanks to an internet renaissance that is bleeding over into every form of written communication. Once it was bad form to end a paragraph with an exclamation mark. Now it’s borderline obligatory. Once it was enough to put a sign on your door: “Back in five minutes.” Now, without the flourish of an exclamation mark, that sign lacks verve or at least zeitgeisty voguishness. Go figure! What is it about email that makes people so excited? <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
If black firefighters in New Haven can’t make a decent showing on for a test that’s required for promotion, then the question is how we can help them do better, right? It should be. But in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, the idea is that the test is inherently “biased” against black people because black people haven’t been doing well on it. The claim that such tests are biased is heard regularly–for example, one quick way to set heads black and white nodding at a forum on education is to toss off that the SAT is “racially biased.” However, the notion of bias here is a peculiar kind of sidestep: If black people tend not to do well on a test, then we are to pretend that regardless of any evidence in the test itself, it must be unfair in some way, because otherwise, why wouldn’t black people do as well on it as others? <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
