Category: words

How serious is the gap between experience and the words we have? Serious. The need to render experience for others is tied to a need for others to understand us, and when unfulfilled, leaves an emptiness that hollows out our sources of motivation. – Nautilus

“It turns out that there are a lot of forces converging to make this shape ideal, and to get the whole picture, we’ll have to look from three angles: the anatomy of a reader, the history of publishing, and — in a brief departure from the world of books — the magic numbers behind printing.” – Book Riot

“In a move that will be welcome news to publishers and other rights holders, advocate general Maciej Szpunar has ruled sites such as Tom Kabinet that sell second-hand ebooks ‘unlawful under EU law.'” – Publishers Weekly

Aaron Peckham started the site back in 1999 at least partly as a joke, but it quickly became a genuinely valuable reference, with users constantly submitting and updating definitions for slang expressions and explanations of memes. What happened? – Wired

“We do not have a diverse literary ecosystem in Canada; its diversity has shrunk rapidly in the past two decades. Two recent accounts amply demonstrate a narrowing of Canada’s publishing activity.” – The Conversation

“The [story] involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Remember how you learned about swearing? It was probably from a kid around your age, maybe an older sibling, and not from an educator or authority figure. And you were probably in early adolescence: the stage when linguistic influence tends to shift from caregivers to peers. Linguistic innovation follows a similar pattern. – The Walrus

Jia Tolentino: “More than a century after The Custom of the Country was published, Undine’s habits, given a superficial makeover, could be rebranded not just as aspirational but feminist. Today, she would learn how to defend her life story as that of a woman going after what she wants and getting it — and what could be more progressive than that? This pitch would be bullshit, but plenty of people would believe it. Our twenty-first-century Undine would have a million followers on Instagram. She’d be a Page Six legend.” – The New Yorker

“The conspirators were Bennett Cerf, publisher and cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a cofounder of the ACLU and its chief legal counsel. The target was United States anti-obscenity law. The bait was a single copy of an English-language novel, printed in Dijon by Frenchmen who could not understand a word of it, bound in bright blue boards, and sold mail-order by the celebrated Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company.” – New York Review of Books