Recommended Reading: All of the New York Times Book Review’s “Money” issue is worth a look, but in particular I recommend checking out Chris Ware’s original graphic short story. (Bonus: the Building Stories author recently contributed to our Year In Reading series.)
The New York Review of Money
Leave It To TV
Recommended Reading: this piece from Electric Literature on how 80s television broached topics that we’re still afraid to talk about today. Here’s a bonus piece on reality television, as well.
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Last words
Japanese director Satoshi Kon died last Tuesday at the age of 46. His last words, a rambling text that his family uploaded to the Internet following his death, have just been translated to English: “Everyone, thank you for all the truly great memories. I loved the world I lived in.”
“Years passed.”
Recommended Reading: “So I Went Away” by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan.
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.
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For Sale: Hemingway App, Doesn’t Work.
A new Hemingway App promises to trim the fat from your writing in a way that the Great Bearded One would’ve approved. The app uses various color codes to highlight writing written in the passive voice, writing that’s too hard to read, and also unnecessary adverbs or complex phrases. Sounds interesting enough, no? Well, the problem is that someone ran the Hemingway App on some actual Ernest Hemingway writing, and it turns out that Papa himself didn’t even write to the app’s standard.
Ready Made
Oddly, America’s only exposure to the French political artist collective Tiqqun has come through onetime Fox News darling Glenn Beck. The Los Angeles Review of Books is here to right that wrong.
Take a Look, It’s In An e-book
Reading Rainbow frontman LeVar Burton plans to launch “an educational iPad app that lets children explore topics of interest.”
A Bit of Advice
Recommended reading: Andrew Solomon draws from Rilke‘s Letters to a Young Poet and gives some advice for young writers. Pair with our own look at “the best advice writers ever received.“
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