Scandal at the Oxford English Dictionary! Robert Burchfield’s efforts in the 70s and 80s to delete words from the dictionary based on their foreign origins have been uncovered.
“Swamp Fuschia”
Book Pirates
The American author is dead, long live the American author! At the New York Times, a eulogy.
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“He was always doing so”
The book Wretched Writing is exactly what you think it is: a compendium of artless puns, dead metaphors and drama-turned-accidental-comedy. At The American Spectator, Matthew Walther takes a tour.
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Colson Whitehead’s Two Types of Books
“There’s only two kinds of books, shit you like, and shit you don’t like," Colson Whitehead told the crowd in his lively AWP Keynote.
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Goodbye To All That
Benjamin Anastas has bid goodbye to the Twitter Village, and he thinks more writers should do the same. “There is a longing built into our online lives that can lead us to healthy attachments with multiple partners, a kind of polyamory of the mind, but it can also encourage the furtive transmission of waxed-chest photos and cock-shots,” he writes. “These are extreme examples of the kind of lonely misfires that Twitter allows, but I felt the temptation to seek comfort from my Twitter feed often enough to realize that it was only a matter of time before I did something embarrassing.”
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Pro-Life Was Progressive
Recommended Reading: This review, though it is really much more than that, of Daniel Williams’ Defenders of the Unborn. Williams’ book takes a detailed look at the history of anti-abortion activism before Roe v. Wade, but more generally it seeks to complicate our entire definition of activism in the context of the pro-life/pro-choice debate.
Greatly Exaggerated
At 74, Clive James is a remarkably prolific poet, one who’s working hard to finish or publish three books in the next year alone. He spoke with Douglas Murray of The Spectator about his unflagging energy. “At the moment, I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die and I don’t,” he says. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on James’s book Cultural Amnesia.
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Far be it for The Guardian to be guilty of trolling for pageviews with a manufactured scandal.