paper trail

Mar 14, 2012 @ 04:00:00 pm

Christopher Walken, audiobook reader for "Where the Wild Things Are."

Consider the interrobang. When ad executive Martin Speckter debuted the half question mark-half exclamation point in 1962, the punctuation point earned write-ups in the Wall Street Journal and Time, and was canonized in several American dictionaries. And then it disappeared. The Millions met up with Speckter’s widow to discuss its rise and fall in popularity, and address the question—what happened to the interrobang‽

There’s no point in finishing bad books, but should we feel obligated to finish good ones?

“The Internet,” Harper’s publisher John MacArthur claims in an op-ed, is basically “a gigantic Xerox machine (albeit with inhuman ‘memory’), and [so poses] the same old threat to copyright and to the livelihoods of writers and publishers alike.” Well, not exactly... Alexis Madrigal responds.

Encyclopedia Britannica halts print publication after 244 years.

Excerpts from Urban Dictionary’s guide to literature—“Chaucer: The end of a joint;” “Eggers: One who often steals golf carts and random cans of soda;” “Seuss: Name affectionately given to dogs believed to be reincarnated versions of other dogs.”

Novelist Christopher Bollen recalls the four years he spent in a grimy Williamsburg apartment, working on the novel he never ended up writing.

The most recent VIDA report proved that not only are venerable magazines (Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, etc.) reviewing fewer female authors, but that they’re also using fewer female reviewers. Does the problem start there, or does gender discrimination trace back to book publishers? The Huffington Post looked at books published by a handful of literary publishing houses—Knopf, Crown; Little, Brown; and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux—and found that “the gender ratios of books published by these imprints are in a few cases almost identical to those of the publications cited in Vida's survey.”

Here’s Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are.