At Humanities, Ammon Shea reports on the best damn thing I’ve read about in a while. It’s a dictionary, but a special dictionary. Let me explain. Now, as everyone knows, a “perfect” dictionary is impossible. First of all, as Shea points out, any dictionary is out of date before it is finished, as it will [...]
Like crispness? Check out this roundup of the artwork of the French illustrator Floc’h. (h/t Frank Wilson, more here and here) At the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan explains why The Hurt Locker deserves the Oscar for best sound editing – “[It's] alignment of death and silence, instead of death and booms, partakes of an [...]
At the Guardian, novelist Henry Sutton pens a top ten list of unreliable narrators. The article begins noting that unreliable narrators have recently become more “reliably unreliable.” How’s that? See, back in the 19th century, narrators tended to be unreliable because they were secretive, duped or weak. In modernist and postmodernist writing, however, narrators are [...]
Is George Orwell’s1984 the most influential novel ever written? That’s what Geoffrey Wheatcroft says in a recent essay in the New York Times: No other [novel] can have so enriched the language. Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or doublethink – the expressions, that is: a glance at [...]
“You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale.” Here’s some advice from Popular Mechanics, at 120 miles per hour. In British Columbia, Victoria’s Poet Laureate makes the mistake of venting her indignation [...]
Last week, two pieces of news coincided. First, Toyota announced a recall of vehicles due to a dangerous malfunction in their accelerators. Second, the Lancet retracted a paper that linked vaccines with autism. The scale of the recall was sweeping. The embarrassing retraction was unheard-of in a medical journal of the Lancet’s stature. CNN covered [...]
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