‘Wilde in America,’ by David M. Friedman By LIESL SCHILLINGERDEC. 5, 2014 Chances are you’ll never have a conversation as scintillating as the one Oscar Wilde was overheard conducting at a gathering in San Francisco in 1882. At the time, the 27-year-old Irish upstart had yet to write any of the works that would earn … Continue reading
Required Reading – “The Reign of Terror”
Tomis Kapitan of the New York Times writes, When President Barack Obama spoke to the public in September about his decision to use American military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria he used familiar language. ISIS (or ISIL as the White House and others refer to the group), the president said, “is … Continue reading
Required Reading: How the Novel Made the Modern World
WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ writes: And how the modern world unmade the novel Martin Amis once remarked, apropos of the idea of writing a book about America, that you might as well try to write one about people, or life. Or, he might have said, the English novel. Yet here we have the fruits of such an enterprise in … Continue reading
Required Reading – Who, What, Why: When did we start saying ‘blah, blah, blah’?
The BBC reports: A Xerox ad from 1995 used the term to show off colour printing: A row erupted during a question-and-answer session by a local newspaper in Oregon when a politician took exception to a reporter writing “blah blah blah” in a notebook. How did these words become part of the lexicon, asks Kate … Continue reading
Required Reading – The Utopian Origins of Restroom Symbols
Steven Heller writes, Navigating through sprawling airports and massive sports stadiums is frustrating enough with them, and traversing through such a labyrinthine world is unimaginable without them. I refer to those minimal pictographs of man, woman, child, car, sink, toilet, etc., that—like the five famous musical notes used to communicate with aliens in Close Encounters of … Continue reading
Required Reading – In Defense of Cliches
Ryan Cooper writes, This man isOrwellian. Writing is tricky business. And so it makes sense that writers are often prickly and opinionated about what makes prose good or bad. Thus, over at the Washington Post lives a very long list of clichés and stale phrases that are now verboten due to overuse: “The Outlook List of Things … Continue reading
Required Reading – Richard Nixon was Jay Gatsby
“The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby *** John Aloysius Farrell writes: IIn April 1974, Richard Nixon went to the movies. His presidency was collapsing, a … Continue reading
Rolling Stone’s 20 Best Music Books of 2013
2013’s Best Music Books If you’re a fan of both rock and reading, 2013 had much to offer. Some of the year’s best music books centered around big-name artists, like Mark Lewisohn’s insanely detailed Beatles bio Tune In, as well as cantankerous autobiographies from both Morrissey and Steely Dan’s grump-in-chief Donald Fagen. But great reads came … Continue reading
Required Reading – “How to write: A year’s worth of advice from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and others”
Joe Fassler writes: This year, I talked to nearly 50 different writers for the By Heartseries, a weekly column about beloved quotes and cherished lines. Each author shared the life-changing, values-shaping passages that have helped sustain creative practice throughout his or her career. Their contributions were eclectic and intensely personal: Jim Crace, whose novel Harvest was a finalist … Continue reading
Required Reading – English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
Megan Garber writes, Let’s start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism. The word “because,” in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, “because” has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I’m … Continue reading
What Alana Found 