Somewhere along the way, the word “cool” became “the most popular slang term of approval in English.” Humanities has a pretty cool (hip, rad, dope, groovy, punk, hot, sweet) theory, tracing it as far back as Zora Neale Hurston’s collection Mules and Men, and the time when “cool was black… cool was jazz.” (Related reading: the most excellent Hepster’s Dictionary (pdf) of 1939 jive talk, and our own history of the slang word “like.”)
On “Cool”
Woop Woop
Ohio poet Stanley Gebhardt accused Violent J, a member of Insane Clown Posse, of stealing his poem, “But You Didn’t,” nine years ago and attempting to pass it off as his own. The poem was originally published in A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Bonus: Kent Russell’s dispatch from “The Gathering of the Juggalos.”
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“Let us not desert one another”
In honor of Jane Austen’s recent birthday: five feminist lessons, culled from her body of work.
Pump the longreads at SXSW
Our own founding editor C. Max Magee is teaming up with our friends at The Bygone Bureau and The Morning News to give a panel discussion at SXSW Interactive 2013 on the future of independent longform writing on the web. If you wanna see the panel make it to Austin, head over the SXSW site to give us your vote. You can register to vote here.
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Nabokov on the Run
One hundred years ago this week, a teenage boy named Vladimir Nabokov fled revolutionary Russia with his family for the safety of Western Europe.
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Not Sure
Are people losing interest in fiction that “offers more questions than answers?” In her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley suggested that modern readers have little taste for uncertainty. At The Rumpus, Rob Roberge asks how much this contributes to popular disinterest in literature.
I’m Not Excited
The “Albums of Our Lives” series over at The Rumpus is a consistent source of entertaining essays. This week’s contribution, which focuses on Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, is no aberration.
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