Adventures in reverse psychology
52,757
Last night, during President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, people were sending out 52,757 Obama related tweets per minute. This morning, the speech was fact checked. And here’s what Steve Almond wished Obama had said.
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Alias Atwood
Following on the success of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Netflix teases a first trailer for its take on Alias Grace. Read our review of the former here.
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“Perfect translation … is of course impossible.”
Ever wonder how Google Translate works? Now you know. These two pieces (one and two) on Lydia Davis‘ translation of Madame Bovary are worth revisiting, too.
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Correcting Gender Inequity
The Interference Archive went on a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to help balance gender inequality on the site, which is overwhelmingly edited by men. Our own Sonya Chung writes on how to write across gender.
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Howling Against Censorship
A San Francisco prisoner wanted to read werewolf erotica so badly that he took it to state court. The case has brought up problems with prison censorship and calls to mind Avi Steinberg’s memoir, Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (here’s our review.)
Coherence Salad
“You couldn’t say, no, this is actually a president, this is exactly how a leader ought to talk and reason, because even with the uhs and ums cleaned out and the spoken sentences made to look like written ones, Trump’s discourse isn’t coherent.” Linguist Michael Erard for The Awl on reading Trump’s transcripts.
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Kindles to Kenya
David Risher founded the nonprofit Worldreader program in 2009 to distribute Kindles to children in the developing world. His aim was to increase literacy. Today the program has shared over 200,000 e-books with children in Ghana and Kenya, and Risher and his colleagues hope to allocate 10,000 reading devices by 2013.