“From this bleak backdrop unspools West Of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan’s sparkling and frequently delightful fictionalized take on those years. It’s a setting that’s near impossible for culture buffs to resist; for a certain subset of nerd, this is a sort of literary Avengers, collecting Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker alongside O’Nan’s delicate and sensitive portrayals of Fitzgerald and wife Zelda, to say nothing of Humphrey Bogart and a cameo by Katharine Hepburn, eating soup.”
Assemble
“Our job is to analyse data, not to love words.”
The Telegraph catches up with John Simpson as he prepares to retire from his role as chief editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. “I used to keep a notebook in my pocket in case I came across new words,” Simpson says at one point. “That worked until I put my trousers in the washing machine.”
Here Refrain
Beautiful, shimmer, jetty. Poets Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Robert Pinsky et al. tell Merriam-Webster about their favorite words. Related, and far less pretty: the most-looked-up words post-election include fascism, bigot, and xenophobe.
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The Movie That Ate Itself
Have some free time today? Might I suggest reading Michael Idov‘s GQ article “The Movie That Ate Itself.” Not convinced? I’ll let the story’s description speak for itself: “Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.”
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Neutral Language and Other Myths
“Apple’s example sentence for ‘shrill’ referenced ‘women’s voices,’ and the one for the word ‘psyche’ read, ‘I will never really fathom the female psyche.’ […] The pronouns in entries for ‘doctor’ and ‘research’ were male, while a ‘she’ could be found doing ‘housework.’” The New Oxford American Dictionary needs its own guidelines for nonsexist usage.
Civil War & Historical Stupidity
Ta-Nehisi Coates wants to make America less stupid about the Civil War. He recommends five books we should all read to gain a better understanding of American history during this war and assures us that “I’ve tried to think very hard about readability, and to offer books you might actually complete.” So no excuses, start here
Gah!
Despite your lifelong aversion to robots and crash-test dummies, the Uncanny Valley might not actually be real. At Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the evidence that unsettling dolls are just that, unsettling.
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