In case you missed it: on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, Steve Inskeep aired excerpts from an interview with a former president — a defeated former president. The defeated one just cannot update, as they say, his priors.
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Spectacular Vernacular
“Linguist Nicole Holliday and Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer discuss the ways language is changing, talk to scholars and writers, and set and solve word puzzles”: it’s Spectacular Vernacular, from Slate. It’s an excellent podcast.
Among the topics in recent episodes: words of the year, the pronunciation(s) of omicron, and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Brooklyn accent. Highly recommended.
[Dr. Fauci has an accent?]
Wordle clones
Last night, The Verge reported on Wordle clones in Apple’s App Store: The App Store clones are here to profit off Wordle’s success. An hour and a half later, the apps were gone.
Wordle is good fun, free, one play a day.
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
From The New Yorker
What are “we” supposed to make of it? I don’t feel the need to make anything of it.
This piece of Cultural Comment characterizes Kim Kardashian and Kanye West as “our two biggest tastemakers.” Again, with the first-person plurals. Your taste, not mine.
I asked someone who’s much closer to popular culture than I am about the phrase “our two biggest tastemakers.” She thought it must be a joke — until she read enough to realize it isn’t. This piece also calls Kardashian and West “one of the most iconic celebrity-mogul couples in the world.” Yep, in the world. At least the writer didn’t choose “on the planet.”
Our household began to wonder months ago about whether to renew our decades-long subscription to The New Yorker. Elaine has given up on the magazine without hesitation. I’ve wavered. This effort at humor put me off. Recent errors of fact about Ralph Ellison and Frank O’Hara, unacknowledged and uncorrected, also put me off. (Yes, I wrote to the magazine.) “Kim & Kanye & Pete & Julia” feels like a message of sorts: this is no longer for me, at least not on a subscription basis.
If this site for advertisers can be trusted, the average age of a New Yorker reader is fifty-four. As I wrote in a previous post, I think the magazine is pitching not to the readers they have but to the readers they hope to acquire, which is one way to lose readers they have, or once had.
The Left Banke’s final album
Omnivore Records is releasing for the first time on CD The Left Banke’s final album, Strangers on a Train, with additional later tracks. Here are the details.
(I’m a fan.)
Related reading
A handful of Left Banke posts
Monday, January 10, 2022
Being avant-garde
“The most avant-garde thing we can be is a human being”: William Parker, composer, bassist, bandleader, who turns seventy today. This observation appears in an e-mail from the record label AUM Fidelity marking the day.
Here’s a hefty sample of Parker at work with his group In Order to Survive.
Related posts
The William Parker Quartet : William Parker in The New York Times : Wood Flute Songs
Google, ugh
From The Washington Post: “Google is manipulating browser extensions to stifle competitors, DuckDuckGo CEO says.” Of course that can only happen if you’re using Chrome.
David Brooks’s books
I went back to Friday’s NewsHour for a screenshot, and I couldn’t resist choosing this one. “Look, Judy! Look, Jonathan! I am . . . a wild and crazy guy!”
I’ve never seen this Brooks background before — he’s usually at one end of a long living (?) room, with books at the other end. I was wondering if there might be a Garner’s Modern English Usage, third edition, among the blues. There isn’t.
But: can you spot the old Bartlett’s Quotations? The title isn’t readable, even with the larger view, but there’s definitely a Bartlett’s Quotations in there.
Related posts
A book on Judy Woodruff’s shelf : T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays on Hardball
[“Wild and crazy”: because he has arranged books by color. I should have been explicit about that.]
How to improve sleeping
I was writing a review of a book of Vivian Maier’s photographs:
What these photographs have in common is — no, that’s no good.
These photographs share — that’s much better.
This post can’t count as a “How to improve writing” post, as those posts are about public prose, and this partial sentence is from the dream world. Yes, I was improving a sentence in a dream.
Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)
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