“Yes, strange, darkness best”

The Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologisme – the division of the French government responsible for preserving the integrity of the Gallic language – ruled last week that enough is enough when it comes to “hashtag.” They feel the word is just too English for the banks of the Seine. They recommend instead using the decidedly softer “mot-dièse” (pro: ‘Mo-Dee-YEZ’). Previously the group asked residents to replace “email” with “courriel.”

This Friday Slate will premiere its first monthly book review feature. On the first weekend of every month, the Slate Book Review will take over the site’s main page.  Senior culture editor Dan Kois told the New York Times that he was displeased to watch newspaper after newspaper scrapping their book sections; “it didn’t seem to me that there was less of an appetite for good writing about books.”

In the Times, Jennifer Schuessler reviews Ishmael Beah’s new novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, which takes place in the same war-ravaged setting as the author’s 2007 memoir. Schuessler writes that Beah “delivers a glimpse of the hardships of postwar Sierra Leone along with strong and repeated assurances about the redemptive powers of stories themselves.”