Category: words

Yes, obviously, humans are animals, and also obviously, we don’t truly know how to get into the mind of a hyena or a fox or a dog, but still: In these books, readers can “expand their taxonomies of personhood: who and what we are willing to grant subjectivity and why.” – LitHub

In northern Australia, indigenous people are reclaiming land and landmark names. “These changes are about time, mate, but we always kept the names when we worked on country anyway – they never went away. But this does give us recognition and that makes us proud.” – The Guardian (UK)

Novelist Helen Garner terrified her friends for years with what they called her pitiless writer’s eye – detached, curious, and omnivorous. But as she ages, she’s found it’s harder and harder to pay that attention to the world. Then the virus, and lockdown, arrived. “The daily work habits of 40 years went up in flames and new ones sprouted from the ashes. Instead of going to bed early and starting work straight after breakfast, I wallowed on the couch till one in the morning, feasting on wild-eyed Jewish stand-up and cold case investigations by women detectives.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Golden Notebook, published almost 60 years ago now, gets to the heart of almost everything (depressingly, still) going on right now. “Lessing — like Anna — is unafraid to dirty her hands in the quest for truth. She might write with an acid touch but she doesn’t keep an Olympian distance from new causes or passionate affairs.” – The New York Times

Lovecraft was clearly racist and clearly an anti-Semite – and guess what? He also thought the Irish were inferior. “Such prejudices weren’t simply background colour. They are front and centre of many of his most iconic tales.” (Which is why a new series would make him so mad.) – Irish Times

Emphasis on that radical, please, when you’re talking about author Carol Shields. – The New York Times

Once the news broke, many of the first edits to Harris’s Wikipedia page were the sort of structural maintenance done by veteran editors on the site: citing sources, attaching categories, improving captions, and adding a notice that Harris was “a person involved in a current event,” and as such, “information may change rapidly as the event progresses.” Someone clarified that, until she’s officially nominated at the Democratic convention next week, Harris is still only the “presumptive vice-presidential nominee.” Grammar was improved; typos were fixed. But then at 4:42 p.m., a user named Eee302 changed Harris’s first name from “Kamala” to “Cuntala.” – The Atlantic

A literal éminence grise (his hair went white decades ago) best known for editing the books-and-culture pages of The New Republic for 32 years, Wieseltier was about to launch a journal funded by Laurene Powell Jobs and called Idea when, in 2017, a slew of #MeToo allegations (none of which he denied) led both the magazine and Wieseltier to be canceled. Now he’s back, with a new quarterly called Liberties (420 pages of text, no images, no ads) about “the rehabilitation of liberalism” — and, perhaps, of the man himself. – Air Mail

The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, part of Birmingham City University, and the composer Edmund Hunt are to lead an effort to fuse music and historic linguistics to examine the sonic footprints of Vikings and Celts. – The Guardian

Not to worry (yet): the papers will continue to publish. But since most newsroom employees have been working from home for months and the timeline for safely returning to offices isn’t clear, Tribune Co. execs have decided to stop paying for the real estate. The papers are the New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, The Morning Call of Allentown (Pa.), the Carroll County Times (Maryland), and the Capital Gazette in Annapolis (Md.), site of the 2018 newsroom shooting. – Yahoo! (AP)