ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

The New Yorker’s Archivist Counted Up Decades’ Worth Of Nonwhite Writers’ Bylines, And …

Erin Overbey: "As someone who's done the research, seen all the numbers, I can tell you that things are simply not changing quickly enough to present real, concrete progress." - Nieman Lab

Is There *Anything* To The Idea That You Can Learn A Foreign Language While You Sleep?

Well, you can't say there's nothing to it. But there's not much. And don't even think that playing recordings of the language while you’re lying there unconscious will save you from studying grammar and sentence structure. But yeah, it can help a little. - Mic

How The Word “Performative” Got Corrupted

What is worse, the meaning of performative in contemporary parlance, while not very precise, is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning. - Hedgehog Review

Why Do We Still Care About Shakespeare?

So why do we still read him, and why do so many people still flock to his plays, despite their archaisms lichened with footnotes and, to citizens of our ironic century, his easily parodied apostrophizing? Why do we still care? - Washington Post

A College Honors Class Turned Its Zoom Fan Fiction Into A Film Deal

Last year, The Great Gatsby came out of copyright, and that's a good thing for a The Great Gatsby 2.0 honors seminar at the University of Iowa. - LitHub

The Larger Narrative Arc Of Colson Whitehead’s Novels

Basically, it's weird jobs. "All these different jobs provide existential questions about how the world works and how they work, how they function, I guess." - Slate

Nicaragua’s Government Is Arresting Prominent Writers Before A Presidential Election

"State prosecutors in Nicaragua have ordered the arrest of one of the country’s most prominent writers, Sergio Ramírez, accusing the 78-year-old novelist of inspiring hatred and conspiring to destabilize Nicaragua." Those charges sound common these days in Nicaragua. - LitHub

New Yorkers Turned To Poetry After The Towers Came Down

People sent poems to newspapers and posted poetry on bus shelters. "When we went into Manhattan to see the site where the Twin Towers had once stood, there were poems traced into the ash that covered everything." - LitHub

Translators Should Be Named On Book Covers

Weirdly, "the underlying assumption on the part of many publishers seems to be that readers don’t trust translators and won’t buy a book if they realise it’s a translation." - The Guardian (UK)

Does Publishing Miss The 45th President?

All signs, and an absolute onslaught of books, point to yes. - The New York Times

Have A Look At The New Yorker’s Original Mission Statement

So many things about the magazine — in both content and design — are recognizable today that it's easy to forget that, when Harold Ross was trying to launch The New Yorker in the 1920s, none of it was there. - Gothamist

Boston Globe And Boston University To Relaunch 19th-Century Abolitionist Newspaper

Envisioned as a 21st-century online successor to the United States' first anti-slavery newspaper, The Emancipator will operate as a not-for-profit and will focus initially on commentary, with plans to add audio-video, longform nonfiction, data visualization, and history annotation. - Nieman Lab

Of Writing And The Usefulness Of Cliches

It was only with the emergence of an artistic movement, beginning around the mid-18th century, that probable language came to be regarded less as the building blocks of composition and more as the too-familiar, the outworn, the boring. - Aeon

The Secrets Of 1,000-Year-Old Riddles

The oldest surviving collection of riddles assembled in English is in the Exeter Book, copied around the turn of the first millennium CE. They were part of an extended English tradition of aenigmae and trick questions in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. - The New York Times

Writing Good Trivia Questions Is Even Harder Than Answering Them

Thorsten A. Integrity (né Shayne Bushfield) of the trivia site LearnedLeague explains what he has to consider: Is this too hard? Too easy? Is it interesting? Is it accurate? Are there other ways to answer this question? Which part should be the question and which the answer? - Slate

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