"No one now can go on insisting on the usual beneficial effects of literature without taking serious and systematic account of Currie's arguments. Not to do so in future will count as intellectual negligence." - Notre Dame Philosophical Review
The magazine's salaried employees formed a union three years ago and have been negotiating for higher pay (at a publication known for low wages) ever since. About 100 of them went to the street outside the Greenwich Village townhouse of Condé Nast's global editorial director on Tuesday, carrying signs in their publication's recognizable headline typeface reading "Fair pay now"...
What’s important to note about these hoaxes is that they are absolutely terrible—totally artless, not believable at all, only really a “fool me once” situation if you were born or signed up for a Twitter account yesterday. Their relative success is even more embarrassing when you consider that the targets are supposed to be readers, people who approach language...
The Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. - The New Yorker
"Even though people did not … personally identify as nonbinary in the way we understand it today (though some identified as 'neuter'), neutral pronouns existed — as did an understanding that the language we had to describe gender was insufficient. … English speakers have proposed 200 to 250 pronouns since the 1780s. Although most petered out almost immediately after...
"The policy change at Princeton presumes the existence of various potential contributions that classics students knowing no Latin or Greek could have been making to classroom discussions before now. What are those contributions?" - The Atlantic
Author and illustrator Jansson found her dream island when she was in her '50s. "Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, 'a rock in the middle of nowhere,' according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis....
Happy Pride Month! Um: The author of the groundbreaking Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and many other experimental, daring works wrote on Twitter, "“Absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers. Turned me into wimmins fiction of the worst kind! Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that’s in there. So I...
Or so says Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl. The book is a combined thriller and social satire that was indeed inspired by Harris' experiences. "Part of me enjoyed editing and I felt I was good at it, but it’s also an exhausting job for an entry-level person in terms of the pay. I was...
Sounds ridiculous, right? What do literary novels have in common with Avengers or WandaVision? Benjamin Percy says his Comet Cycle came about because he wanted to "go wild, do something different, change shit up, and create an experience—from a creative and business perspective—that was lit from beginning to end." - LitHub
In the U.S., people like nonfiction, especially self-help - and cookbooks, and sex advice. The books in the best-seller canon "are not books so much as appliances. They are not read; they are used. And probably many of them have been bought by people who do not otherwise buy many books." - The New Yorker
"Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and — though the hypothesis has yet to be tested — it's widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. In many ways, the dynamic represents a microcosm of the current political moment: Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his...
"The $7 million lawsuit … alleges that Dirk Obbink stole 32 items from the Egyptian Exploration Society at the University of Oxford's Sackler Library and sold them to Hobby Lobby, the nationwide arts and crafts chain owned by an evangelical Christian family," which was trying to rapidly assemble a collection for the Museum of the Bible, which it opened...
"Linguists trace this shift to Philadelphia's elite schools. Any way of speaking that falls outside the norm is viewed negatively in certain settings, so students at these schools may feel pressured to adapt the less noticeable mid-Atlantic accent. … If the trend continues, the classic Philly accent could become extinct within two decades." - Mental Floss
