Amy Hempel

From the Vice fiction issue, an interview with Amy Hempel: “I never liked the term 'minimalism.' I prefer Raymond Carver’s term. He called Mary Robison and myself 'precisionists.' And that’s what he was doing too, of course.”

It has been only a few days since Google announced their Books NGram Viewer, a tool that allows you to graph word usage over the years, drawn from millions of digitized books, and there’s already been a bit of NGram fever. Some of the most interesting inquiries have been posed by Slate’s Tom Scocca, who’s discovered when television became more popular than the bible (around 1967), and when anxiety overtook shame (1942), as well as other watershed moments in American vocabulary (1992: The year jeans surpassed trousers). But does the F-word reveal inaccuracies in the underlying data, causing

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