Apologies for bringing this up, but in a WaPo review of Sorry!: The English and their Manners, Jonathan Yardley points out that your average English person says “sorry” eight times a day.
Not to be Rude
The Many Shades of Plagiarism
In the beginning was the word, and the word was plagiarized, and this regular old plagiarism was bad. But then Jonah Lehrer taught us about self-plagiarism, and that was bad, too, but somehow less so. And now Jane Goodall is teaching us about Wikipedia plagiarism, which seems bad as well, and you know what? It’s hard to grade these things anymore. What’s next? David Bowie cribbing lines from T.S. Eliot?
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Steady As She Goes
“I prefer … to believe, in the weird and sometimes happy accidents that result—in this case—in kissing a beautiful stranger in the rain. It didn’t really change anything, but it wasn’t trivial. It was one of those encounters that rises up out of nowhere and sinks back into it, giving off light and energy as it goes.” Kim Addonizio’s new addition to Guernica’s “The Kiss” series is fantastic and life-affirming.
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Building Up
It’s fitting that Ray Bradbury credited his interest in architecture to an H.G. Wells story he read when he was five. At The Paris Review Daily, a previously unpublished essay by the author, who says his career in architecture started when he noticed there was no plaque at the residence of Sherlock Holmes. Related: Tanjil Rashid on Bradbury’s connection to the Middle East.
Hannah Horvath is headed to Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Or is she?
Samantha Chang, the director of Iowa’s Writing Workshop, weighed in on the Girls storyline in which Lena Dunham’s character gets accepted into the school’s MFA program. “It’s very possible that she could have gotten in,” Chang says of Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s character. Meanwhile, University of Iowa officials have apparently denied the HBO show’s request to film on-campus for its next season.
Very, Very Direct
Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t exactly sure why white people love his book so much. It is indisputable that they do love it, though; Coates’ Between the World and Me is a runaway bestseller and he is also the recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “Genius grants.”
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The Right Kind of Ambivalence
In the latest entry in By Heart, which I’ve written about before, Thirty Girls author Susan Minot explains why she prefers to read multiple books at once instead of reading through single books from start to finish. Her reasoning? Books are “worlds to dip in and out of, and my relationship to them is continually deepening and evolving.”
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Ah, the Humanities!
Nicholas Dames is a wonderful writer, and I suggest you read his essay on the “crisis” in the Humanities.