At The Washington Post, Michael Dirda on the dissolute genius Thomas De Quincey (opium addict, original chronicler of addiction, master of the macabre, prolific C19th essayist).
An Opium Eater, Reconsidered
Library Buys Poet’s 40000 Emails
The British Library has paid £32,000 for poet Wendy Cope‘s email archive. A far cry from stacks of personal letters, but seemingly the natural progression of things. According to Cope herself, many of the emails “are not interesting at all”. (via @BookBench)
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#history
“if you’re looking to sound clever, you could call it an ‘octothorpe’, the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it.” The history of hashtags, and other words that the Internet has given us.
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Emo Allan Poe
Quoth Edgar Allan Poe or an emo band? Take this trickier-than-it-looks quiz, and decide for yourself.
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Helpful Elves
Fact: 4 percent of books are written by secret government agencies, while a full .5 percent are authored by helpful elves. How do we know? The New Yorker said so.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)
Ursula K. Le Guin has died at the age of 88, according to the New York Times and Le Guin’s family. The prolific science fiction and fantasy writer — best known for her Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness — explored themes like politics, gender, religion, and environmentalism. However, Le Guin wrote across genre and published over 20 novels, 100 short stories, 7 essay collections, 13 children’s books, 5 volumes of translation, and a writer’s guide. No stranger to awards, Le Guin most recently won the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Related Work for Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016. From our archives: The Millions interview with Le Guin from 2013.