This interactive guide to the demise (or, rather, the rise) of the passive voice by Vijith Assar at McSweeney’s is every bit as fascinating as it is troubling. This notable piece from The Millions by Fiona Maazel should act as a nice grammatical complement.
While a Fox Was Brown
The Future
Forget apps, forget tweets, forgo the digital all together - how about magazines as performance art?
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Writer Etiquette
What's the one question you should never ask a writer starting a new book: how's the writing going? "Nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready," Mark Slouka writes. Follow his advice for how to keep your writer friends.
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newspeak is actualy newtxt
John McWhorter, linguist and author of What Language is (And What it Isn't and What it Could Be), takes a look at the history of spoken and written language in an effort to understand how text messaging, IMs, and other informal forms of written language impact literacy.
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Tom Hanks, Fiction Writer
Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”
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Your Local Unpaid Librarian
“They would have closed, if the community hadn’t stepped forward.” The Guardian reports on the rapidly growing number of British libraries being run by volunteers, a trend driven by austerity cuts (which Corinne Purtill wrote about in these very pages just a few weeks ago).
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