What is worse, the meaning of performative in contemporary parlance, while not very precise, is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning. - Hedgehog Review
So why do we still read him, and why do so many people still flock to his plays, despite their archaisms lichened with footnotes and, to citizens of our ironic century, his easily parodied apostrophizing? Why do we still care? - Washington Post
Last year, The Great Gatsby came out of copyright, and that's a good thing for a The Great Gatsby 2.0 honors seminar at the University of Iowa. - LitHub
Basically, it's weird jobs. "All these different jobs provide existential questions about how the world works and how they work, how they function, I guess." - Slate
"State prosecutors in Nicaragua have ordered the arrest of one of the country’s most prominent writers, Sergio Ramírez, accusing the 78-year-old novelist of inspiring hatred and conspiring to destabilize Nicaragua." Those charges sound common these days in Nicaragua. - LitHub
People sent poems to newspapers and posted poetry on bus shelters. "When we went into Manhattan to see the site where the Twin Towers had once stood, there were poems traced into the ash that covered everything." - LitHub
Weirdly, "the underlying assumption on the part of many publishers seems to be that readers don’t trust translators and won’t buy a book if they realise it’s a translation." - The Guardian (UK)
So many things about the magazine — in both content and design — are recognizable today that it's easy to forget that, when Harold Ross was trying to launch The New Yorker in the 1920s, none of it was there. - Gothamist
Envisioned as a 21st-century online successor to the United States' first anti-slavery newspaper, The Emancipator will operate as a not-for-profit and will focus initially on commentary, with plans to add audio-video, longform nonfiction, data visualization, and history annotation. - Nieman Lab
It was only with the emergence of an artistic movement, beginning around the mid-18th century, that probable language came to be regarded less as the building blocks of composition and more as the too-familiar, the outworn, the boring. - Aeon
The oldest surviving collection of riddles assembled in English is in the Exeter Book, copied around the turn of the first millennium CE. They were part of an extended English tradition of aenigmae and trick questions in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. - The New York Times
Thorsten A. Integrity (né Shayne Bushfield) of the trivia site LearnedLeague explains what he has to consider: Is this too hard? Too easy? Is it interesting? Is it accurate? Are there other ways to answer this question? Which part should be the question and which the answer? - Slate
Ever since the prize was first mooted in the early 1990s, many have wondered whether the prize is necessary, patronising, or even fair. A common position amongst its detractors is that the prize is sexist and discriminatory. - The Conversation
