"Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review … and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce...
Dickens' 17-year-old sister-in-law collapsed one night as she returned from the theatre, and died in the arms of the writer. "A failure of Hogarth’s heart was blamed, but today an aneurism, or stroke, is suspected as the more likely cause of death. It was a shock that altered Dickens for ever, throwing a shadow over his imaginative life." -...
Masterful essay writer Elissa Mashuta: "This is the dilemma at the heart of the process: writing would be easier if I had an assured end point to aim for, but the essay only works if I begin without knowing what I’ll find as I advance through the paragraphs. I want to control everything, but the essay won’t let me."...
Those who read the book or saw the movie may not quite believe it, but the real-life case from which the author drew her inspiration was far worse. Then there were her own kids. "I had three and a half years’ worth of things to say. About what a huge gap separates an adult and a small child, with...
"Newsletters began in mid-fifteenth-century Venice. Subscribers would receive handwritten letters twice a week rounding up interesting events. Sixteenth-century merchants used similar news sources to keep track of exchange rates, taxes, and other business news. The form's popularity expanded in England after the country's first postal service took off around 1660. This opened the door to news writers, who could...
Like his forebears under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, David Kipen rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He started writing letters to lawmakers calling for a revamped program for the COVID-19 era, and last May he wrote a piece for The Times examining that possibility. The article, headlined “85 years ago, FDR saved American writers. Could...
"As strangely ho-hum as Hooked on Phonics feels now, it was once a juggernaut in the educational space, selling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of units each year. It promised something that seemed a little stunning to parents — the idea that, with a home program, students could learn how to read basically on their own by following...
The letters were between the French author of The Little Prince and his wife, a Salvadoran artist of whom his family sternly disapproved. The lengthy lawsuits were between his relatives and her heirs over rights to previous books about the couple's courtship and marriage. - The Guardian
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe on exclamation points, Garielle Lutz and Toni Morrison on commas, Norman Mailer on hyphens, Cormac McCarthy on periods, and Gertrude Stein on periods, commas, and semicolons: "They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them...
A life made, or half-made, under conditions of academic precarity is often a paranoid, anxious, stupefying life—stupefying in part because, in some sense, you chose it. - The Nation
"The novel is an extremely flexible form. It can come out in countless shapes, include infinite content, and end up almost any length. Let’s call the lower limit of a novel 40,000 words. Long novels like Infinite Jest and The Stand are more than 10 times that length, and that’s not even getting into series or In Search of...
A clunky, outmoded piece of software called OverDrive had been the standard app for getting reading material from the library onto your Kindle. Instead of merely upgrading, OverDrive (the company) created a new, far more user-friendly app called Libby which debuted but only started getting public attention over the past year. - Engadget
"There may be an ideological component to publishing Pence and Conway, but it has nothing to do with ideas. It has to do with fetishizing ideological diversity, in which publishing garbage books from prominent Republicans is an end in and of itself. These deals only underline what’s been increasingly obvious for decades now: The commitment to free speech and...
Just ask novelist Ali Smith, who finished the last of a four-book sprint during the first lockdown: "I felt the usual failure ... Knackered. Curious as to whether the book would hold water, and as for the series: no idea. Hope, despair. All these feelings passed in the 30 seconds it takes to toast something that’s done with...
Running an independent press isn't easy in an era of consolidation - and in a pandemic. Seven Stories' editor-in-chief: "As a business the time of greatest risk—and very possibly also of greatest reward—is right now, this year, next year. We’re on a growth curve, which has not always been the case. The marketplace for books actually grew in America...
