The Library of Congress has chosen the oft-honored W. S. Merwin as the 2010–11 Poet Laureate. The eighty-two year old poet and translator doesn't fancy rousing himself from island life in Maui, as he told the New York Times: “I do like a very quiet life . . . I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington,” though he told the Washington Post "I am very happy to do it at a time when there is someone that I respect so much in the White House." Known for his astute ecological poems, we wonder if Merwin's first official act will be to pen some venomous verse over the recent oil spill in the Gulf.
Brave new words: Inside Higher Ed's Scott Mclemee catches up the latest Twitter scholarship.
Shelve your Strunk and White and yell "Yahoo!": The blogosphere is buzzing over next week's release of The Yahoo! Style Guide, which, among other things, has a primer on headline writing, and recommends keeping the idiosyncratic punctuation of companies and organizations—it's Yahoo!, not Yahoo.
As Amazon continues to battle with Apple in the ebook reader market, it has announced a new Kindle DX, slashing the price of the device to $379.
