At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell reports back from The Boring Conference, a riveting event that takes place each year in a nondescript hall in East London.
Not to Be Missed
Writerly Pets
Famous authors and their dogs, photographed by Jill Krementz. Via The Daily Dish.
That Was Fast
McCain speechwriter Mark Salter has been outed as the “Anonymous” behind the political novel O just two days after the book hit shelves.
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Speaking like Shakespeare
“What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare?” A father and son team are working to answer this question, recover Shakespeare’s original pronunciation and perform his plays in the new-old style, and lest this sound like a silly exercise in scholarship consider that “two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets…. have rhymes that only work in [Old Pronunciation].”
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The Thoreau Diet
“Thoreau did kill, cook and eat a woodchuck that was eating his beans. But he decided that was a lousy way to treat a woodchuck and he never did it again.” In celebration of his bicentennial, NPR sets straight five myths about Henry David Thoreau‘s diet, including the pernicious canard that he stole pies from neighbor’s windowsills. See also “My Summer with Henry,” on reading Thoreau’s Cape Cod on Cape Cod.
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Roald Dahl and the Hilariously Bad Grades
A newly released Roald Dahl collection, The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets, includes a secret ending to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and excerpts from the author’s hilariously bad report cards. Wrote one teacher about Dahl in 1931: “A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.” (via Galley Cat)