Brian Nitz wants environmentalists and writers to seriously consider whether the word “sustainable” is, well, sustainable. (Related: this XKCD comic)
Unsustainable Sustainability
Wetlands
Recommended Reading: Blake Morrison on the literature of England’s flood-prone east coast.
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The Times on Boo
Upon the release of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the Times profiles the spotlight-shy Katherine Boo, “Unlike many journalists Katherine Boo aspires to invisibility.”
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New Sherlock Holmes Story
The last few weeks have been all about rediscovered works by beloved authors, first Harper Lee‘s upcoming sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, then Dr. Seuss‘s What Pet Should I Get? Now Arthur Conan Doyle joins the trend with a rediscovered Sherlock Holmes short story, available online from Vulture.
You Think It, She’ll Write It
“They are both popular and literary and seem to have no problem standing with a foot in each category.” For The Paris Review, our own Adam O’Fallon Price writes about the “unambiguous sophistication” of Curtis Sittenfeld‘s writing—which is often regulated to the world of “chick lit”—and her new short story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. (Read our interview with Sittenfeld.)
To Go Boldly? What?
There are times when it’s a bad idea to wantonly split an infinitive. But there are other times, grammar Nazis, when it’s really okay to chill out.
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The Words of E.B. White
E. B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of Charlotte’s Web; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Later on, he helped define the voice of the early New Yorker. Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers, an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White.
“The muscle that helps you ignore people with bad advice”
“The greatest mistake the American writer ever made was asking everybody else what they thought of their writing. Look around your current writing workshop. Look right and left. Most of those people will stop writing. Because it’s too hard, they have no ideas, no one understands them, whatever. A few of those failed people will become editors. These are the only people in the room who should ever really matter to you.”
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