Leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary folks to put a damper on the linsane amount of eponyms based on Jeremy Lin’s surname.
Linguistics
Dreamweaver
For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.
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“Listening feels like a weighted choice”
If you read only one take on Rihanna and Chris Brown's latest musical (and personal) partnership, make it this one by Ann Powers.
Stephen FryTube
Some kind soul has uploaded all of Stephen Fry's QI (Quite Interesting) to YouTube. Enjoy.
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“Do not open until war is over.”
“What he discovered was a box filled with disguised anti-Nazi tracts hidden in packets of tea and shampoo and concealed in miniature books both popular and scholarly.”
POTUS Picks
For its November issue, Wired asks guest editor President Obama for a list of his 10 essential books. The magazine estimates that reading all of them, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, will take only eighty-nine hours.
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I’d Prefer Not To
"REPORTER: You’ve reportedly conveyed to Judge Garland that if he comes knocking on your office door he’ll be wasting his time. But would you deign to meet with him somewhere off the grounds of the U.S. Capitol? Say, at a Starbucks? BARTLEBY: I would prefer not to." This Bartleby, the Senator: A Story of Merrick Garland (not to be confused with the Bartleby, the Scrivener).
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