“The rest of her speech to the U.N. that day is an exact outline for what she wanted the rest of the Parable books to be about — a way out that she did not live to write herself.” For Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma explores the unwritten Parable books of acclaimed sci-fi author Octavia Butler. Pair with our consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
Unknown Parables
Connecting the Dots
How did commas, colons, dashes, and question marks come into existence? Keith Houston writes for BBC about the history of punctuation.
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Chicken Soup for the Stall
As literary genres go, bathroom graffiti ranks somewhere between obscenities carved into desks and poorly spelled comments in terms of respectability. Yet it’s still a form that could reveal interesting things, which is why a group of researchers took a series of fact-finding trips to public stalls across America. Their takeaway? “The mere fact of being in a public bathroom could be skewing how people choose to present themselves when they uncap that Sharpie.” Related: Buzz Poole on The History of American Graffiti.
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The Last Sports Bar
With the Detroit Tigers in the playoffs for the second year in a row, our own Bill Morris takes to the pages of the New York Times to remember the legendary Detroit bar the Lindell A.C., where sports stars rubbed elbows with the fans.
Transgressive, Interesting, Weird
This summer, Emily Books will launch a new imprint with Coffee House Press, featuring books “by women and gay men and gender outsiders—or people who had transgressive, interesting, weird personalities.” Also check out this Millions essay on what we call what women write.
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How Long ’til Computers Start Buying Books?
Do “algorithms and online recommendations threaten to replace [publishers] as arbiters of quality”? This Economist riff on e-book publishing says so. Elsewhere, at least 20 companies are using computer software instead of human beings to write their articles.
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Shhhh!
The sound level of a typical quiet bedroom measures 30 decibels, but what if you still can’t concentrate on your reading? Well, maybe you should move to Minneapolis and use Steven Orfield’s “anechoic chamber,” which at -9 decibels is officially the quietest room in the world.
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