There’s an Apostrophe Protection Society, and it’s in crisis mode.
Aposthropocalypse
The Vulgar and Beautiful
At Big Other, Greg Gerke reads William H. Gass's The Tunnel and looks at language, the controversy over the book, and how the vulgar and the beautiful relate.
Jeff Bridges to Adapt The Giver
Jeff Bridges is working to adapt Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and production is slated to begin in South Africa this fall. Bridges will play the titular Giver, and Deadline is reporting that Australian unknown Brenton Thwaites will play Jonas.
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“Pixel Dust”
"In the end, no special effects, dazzling displays, augmented realities, or multimodal cross-platform designs substitute for content. Scholarship, good scholarship, the work of a lifetime commitment to working in a field — mapping its references, arguments, scholars, sources, and terrain of discourse — has no substitute." Johanna Drucker writes about both the importance and the inherent difficulty of scholarly publishing for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Skirmishing With the Eminati
Look out, Darwin -- Wolfe's coming for you. Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which we reviewed a couple of days ago, takes aim at Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky: "Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine."
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Political Ads Through the Ages
In his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama explained his weariness of campaign advertisements when he said, “If you’re sick of hearing me ‘approve this message,’ believe me, so am I.” These days, those ads are everywhere; it’s totally normal to feel overwhelmed. So as a refresher, consider a journey through elections past via The Living Room Candidate, an online archive of presidential campaign commercials from 1952-2008.
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