“Putin, like Hitler, understood that the purpose of spectacles is to dazzle the eye while clouding the mind.” For the Daily Beast, staff writer Bill Morris writes about the thuggish dictators who love the propaganda of the World Cup. (If you haven’t already checked out our list of seven great soccer reads, do it now!)
Putin Wins the World Cup
The Trouble with Google Books
Laura Miller at Salon reports on the ongoing problems with Google Books’ plan to "digitally scan every book in the world."
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The OA’s New EIC
Take the opportunities provided by this video and this interview to get to know Roger Hodge, the new editor of The Oxford American.
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Emotional Reading
Very important: what food says about literary characters.
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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.
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If Charlotte Lucas were a cat
"If a modern film version of Pride and Prejudice were produced today, some of the main characters should be gay, Elizabeth and Darcy should not get married at the end, and Charlotte Lucas should be played by a tabby cat." Laura Fairchild reveals her students' ideas for new adaptations of Jane Austen novels while meditating on what Austen can or can't teach us about modern relationships.
Wordless Novels
"There is a saying that has become a cliché: 'Pictures speak louder than words.' But sometimes, a picture can speak louder than words because it contains a profound silence. It’s what a picture does not say that can often make it loud. What is, after all, a wordless novel but a novel devoted to the message of silence?" On Frans Masereel's My Book of Hours, a wordless novel in woodcuts. For another, lighter perspective on the power of picture books, pair with Jacob Lambert's "Yet Again, I Ask: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?"
A Muppety Man
Remember the Muppet movie when Kermit has an existential crisis about time? Yeah, we never saw that one either. But a new biography of Jim Henson, Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones, discusses Henson's early experimental filmmaking (sans puppets) and plans to open a psychedelic nightclub in the 1960s. You can watch the aforementioned trippy short film "Time Piece."