Looking for someone to whip your writing into shape? Then tweet the new Gordon Lish bot, a Twitter account which offers unvarnished critiques of your tweets and fictional sentences. (Related: Frank Kovarik on the editor’s relationship with Raymond Carver.)
This Curiosity is Awful
I’m sorry Shakespeare I am for real
Who has a bigger vocabulary: Shakespeare or André 3000? It's actually Outkast. Data scientist Matt Daniels created an infographic that charts 85 rappers' unique vocabulary in their first 35,000 lyrics. Outkast uses 5,212 unique words; whereas, Shakespeare only uses 5,170. But Aesop Rock beats the Bard by more than 2,000 words with a count of 7,392 unique words.
Something Pagan In Me
What is the greatest crime in literary history? Depending on who you ask, it was probably the burning of Byron's memoirs. Shortly after his death, three of Byron's closest friends, along with a few attorneys representing family interests, decided that the memoirs were too scandalous to publish and thus tossed them bit by bit into a fireplace. They claim to have been acting in his best interest, and, as Byron himself said, "There is no instinct like that of the heart."
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Reading for the Worse
Leslie Jamison and Francine Prose discuss the ways reading can affect your life for the worse, with potential results ranging from murder to being bad at sports.
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Illustrating the Cave
TED-Ed illustrates Plato’s allegory of the cave in this fun video.
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Brickjest
Infinite Jest may have "really taken on a foothold as the 'novel of ideas' of the late 20th and early 21st centuries" but now it's also a "novel of legos," courtesy of Kevin Griffith and his 11 year old son, Sebastian.
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