A couple weeks ago, Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll argued in a Salon piece that David Foster Wallace, who wrote an essay about the television and irony back in the early ‘90s, presciently diagnosed the danger of snark in our own age. Now Peter Finocchiaro, a senior editor at Salon, argues instead that we need irony more than we ever have. You could also read A-J Aronstein’s notes from the DFW Symposium.
Not What You Said Before
Take a Look
“I remember LeVar shooting at a zoo and an elephant had a cold and kept blowing snot all over him. He never lost his cool. 'OK, let’s try it again.'” OMG guys, Mental Floss has an oral history of Reading Rainbow! And let us also never forget the reminiscences of our founder C. Max Magee's mom upon learning the show would be cancelled.
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Thanks, Amigo
In his upcoming book Borrowed Words, Philip Durkin looked at the languages that have shaped English over the centuries, charting the influence of Spanish, Italian, French and more. At Slate, he sums up his most important data with the help of an interactive tool.
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Geoff Dyer on Garry Winogrand
Year in Reading alum Geoff Dyer takes a fascinating look at two photographers – Garry Winogrand and Tod Papageorge – who happened to photograph the same thing at the same time, but wound up producing wildly different images.
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A Bacon Bookmark
Bacon. Cheese slices. A saw blade. Buttered broccoli. Librarians around the world lament the strangest food (and non-food) items their patrons have used as bookmarks (via The Guardian). Pair with: an essay on librarians, sex, and stereotypes.
Not a Chore
One of the more persnickety questions a writer has to deal with is how to capitalize the title of a piece correctly. Thankfully, there’s now a website that does it for you, based on the rules in the Chicago Manual of Style.