“‘A language without umlauts,’ he wrote, ‘sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.'” If Esperanto just doesn’t have enough umlauts, Volapük just might be the right made-up language for you.
It’s All Volapük To Me
Yiyun Li and the Extraordinary World of ‘War and Peace’
Yiyun Li revisits Tolstoy's War and Peace and reflects on the many ways it continues to resonate throughout generations.
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“You Need a Rhyming Word? That’s What We Heard!”
Sesame Street turned in a literary puppet parody in their Sons of Anarchy send-up: Sons of Poetry.
Stories and Glass
From the Paris Review: Daniel Torday on lost family stories, Pliny the Elder, and the origins of glass.
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Glitterati
Ever got the feeling that literary life used to be a lot more glamorous? Well, thanks to this review, we now have some proof that it was. In The Times Literary Supplement, a review of Antonia Fraser’s new memoir, which includes her memories of meeting the Queen and dancing with T.S. Eliot. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Facebook Fun
Millions Fans: The Millions Facebook group now has over 400 members. We’ll be asking group members to help us with some upcoming special features, so join up (if you’re into that sort of thing.)
On “Cool”
Somewhere along the way, the word “cool” became “the most popular slang term of approval in English.” Humanities has a pretty cool (hip, rad, dope, groovy, punk, hot, sweet) theory, tracing it as far back as Zora Neale Hurston’s collection Mules and Men, and the time when “cool was black… cool was jazz.” (Related reading: the most excellent Hepster’s Dictionary (pdf) of 1939 jive talk, and our own history of the slang word “like.”)
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