You probably knew a Lothario was a character before his name grew into a generic euphemism for “Guy You Don’t Want Your Daughter Dating,” but what about “brainiac,” “mentor,” and “pamphlet”? It turns out character names have been making their way into everyday vocabulary for thousands of years.
“She’s such a Hermione”
Reading is a Kafkaesque Experience
In the latest entry in By Heart, the Atlantic series we’ve written about a few times, Ben Marcus (who recently came out with a new book) reflects on the true meaning of the word “Kafkaesque.” Marcus interprets Kafka’s “A Message from the Emperor” as a parable about the difficulty of real human connection. (Related: there’s now a Kafka video game.)
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Will the real Don Draper please stand up?
Chicago Magazine's charming 2009 profile of Draper Daniels, a.k.a. the real life Don Draper, written by Myra Janco Daniels, a.k.a. his wife.
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Let There Be
"LET THERE BE stress. Let the body respond to stress as it does to injury and infection. Let stress be a vulture that pecks at the mind and devours the body. This will make people less likely to be stressed. When they see stress wreak wrath upon the body, they will surely calm down a lot." It seems the big problem with intelligent design is that it had a pretty sub-par peer review.
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Hitchens on Mamet
It almost sounds too terrifying to be true. Your book is reviewed by Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review and he opens with: "This is an extraordinarily irritating book" (and it gets worse from there, and deservedly so). It happened to David Mamet and his new book The Secret Knowledge.
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Phonies
The case against The Catcher in the Rye. But what will all of the hip high school teachers assign now? (Our own Garth Risk Hallberg disagrees.)
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