Because I Said So! author and Jeopardy all star Ken Jennings is debunking space myths all month over at Woot. In his first installment, he looks at just how much money was spent to develop NASA’s “space pen.”
Ken Jennings Debunks Space Myths
Thanks Sounds Good
“I love you, in its formal semantic meaning, is at once fetishized and sacrosanct; our familiarity with it as a speech-act is equally uneasy. Type ‘using I love you’ into Google and the first autocomplete result is ‘too much’; the second is ‘as a weapon.’” Google’s recently unveiled Smart Reply feature is saying “I love you” too much. Or is it just the right amount?
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Founding, Growing, and Evolving ‘The Millions’
C. Max Magee looks back on the past 15 years as an online publisher, cataloging the lessons he learned founding and growing The Millions.
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Je Ne Sais Quois
Chances are you’ve heard that the most important thing a writer needs to make it in the modern lit world is luck. Undoubtedly, there’s a lot of truth to that, but what if there’s another factor that has a bigger impact on a writer’s success? Sean McElwee argues for the importance of something more prosaic.
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In Good Standing
This one goes out to all you procrastinators out there. A woman in Auckland, New Zealand has just returned a library book (Myths and Legends of Maoriland) a cool sixty-seven years late–she had “been meaning to return it” for decades. Hopefully she didn’t leave any boogers.
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Top 3 Reasons Why You Need to Read Mark O’Connell’s Latest
1. The listicle is “the house style of a distracted culture.”
2. Our own Mark O’Connell writes about the ubiquitous form for The New Yorker.
3. And fittingly, he writes about it in a list.