When James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, issued his famous “Appeal to the English-speaking public to read books” in 1879, asking readers to send word-evidence from those books to help him make his dictionary, he couldn’t have envisioned reality TV getting involved. But it has. Punctuation is no place for zero tolerance: Lynne Truss and others demand a rigidly standard English, but our language has fewer unbreakable rules than they want. A small margin for success: Ian McMillan enters the world of the fringe publishers – who survive with only ingenuity and innovative writing to help. Curse of the Mommy: John Sutherland on the best way to sell books in the US. Harry Potter and the Death of Reading: Why America's literary obsession is bad news for books.
From PopMatters, We Are What We Think About What We Eat: Why is literature about food — read in a state of inner solitude, much like the experience of dining alone — so alluring?; Elitist Dumpster Divers: Freegans might seem like environmental crusaders, but they parasitically glean the leavings of those they deride, the people who have actually struggled to make a difficult peace with an imperfect economic system; and an interview with Steve Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats. A review of Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening by Aurelia C. Scott.
From Commentary, At Home with The Sopranos: Benjamin A. Plotinsky on a fictional New Jersey mobster and us. Where Funny Goes To Die: The long, sad decline of Robin Williams: a timeline. With the debut of Comedy By the Numbers: The 169 Secrets of Humor and Popularity by Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren, we can all enjoy both the prickly irritation and gut-busting guffaws of hanging out with funny people as they talk shop.
From PopMatters, an article on film portrayals of journalists. Rupert Murdoch's $5bn move for the Wall Street Journal provoked outrage and a desperate rearguard action, but the daily hymn-sheet of the free market was hardly in a strong position to complain. In this increasingly celebrity-obsessed world has the "gossip-isation" of the news rendered the columns redundant? Two new long-form investigative series, in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, demonstrate the value of this news format. Believing is "seeing": A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but without words, pictures can be ambiguous. The famous Robert Capa photo from the Spanish Civil War: a man caught at the instant he is shot, or slipping in a training exercise? Only the caption can tell - if it is honest. Usually the story that accompanies the picture is more important than the picture.
