“Longtime readers are already mourning the end of an era as CBS announced today that at the end of this month it would cease print operations of the popular drama NCIS.”
‘NCIS’ To Cease Print Edition
Neutral Language and Other Myths
“Apple’s example sentence for ‘shrill’ referenced ‘women’s voices,’ and the one for the word ‘psyche’ read, ‘I will never really fathom the female psyche.’ […] The pronouns in entries for ‘doctor’ and ‘research’ were male, while a ‘she’ could be found doing ‘housework.’” The New Oxford American Dictionary needs its own guidelines for nonsexist usage.
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Nimble Publishing
VQR has published an essay by Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press that provides an overview of some of the innovative small presses at work today. Fischbach specifically mentions Tin House, Melville House and Two Dollar Radio as “nimble” publishing houses that “can try things big publishers might not find worthwhile or consistent with the aims of a traditional publishing program,” such as producing micro-budget films or illustrated versions of classic works of literature.
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Forty Four Presidential Flashes
Every Tuesday from now until November 6th, Melville House will post original flash pieces about the U.S. presidents. Here’s Millions contributor Steve Himmer on George Washington, and here’s Level End author Brian Oliu’s take on James Monroe.
“Madness and Meaning”
From Nebuchadnezzar to Hippocrates to the Victorian asylum: The Paris Review takes a look at mental illness and its treatments across the centuries.
Vintage Barthelmismo
Thomas Pynchon defined what he termed “vintage Barthelmismo” as “fictions thoughtfully concocted and comfortably beyond the reach of time.” This moving tribute to Donald Barthelme by Padgett Powell from the forthcoming anthology, A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors, is right in line with Pynchon’s sentiment. Here’s another Barthelme mention from The Millions that you may be interested in.
For the Squares
“To use the lingo of their era, these novels are square. The protagonists have names like Jane and Barbara; they are not the misfits of which much teen literature is made but instead fundamentally good girls who long to fit in, and usually do … Viewed through the lens of contemporary culture, and especially contemporary teen lit, these girls should be boring and shallow. But Beverly Cleary’s supposedly ordinary girls are complex: resentful of their mothers one moment and sympathetic toward them the next, willing to do anything for one special boy but indignant when they’re taken for granted.” On the unexpectedly complex nature of Beverly Cleary’s boring protagonists with Ruth Graham at Slate.