If your dream is to talk like Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek, look no further than Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, one of the dictionaries Catherine O’Hara used to tweak her iconic character’s lines. Read more
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A nation recovering from the worst health emergency in 100 years needs novels full of humor. But if laughter is the best medicine, our fiction is in dangerously short supply. It’s an odd and persistent problem, compounded by the fact that most of the novels marketed as funny are, in fact, not very funny. Or they traffic in wit so dry their lips would crack if they smiled. Read more
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In Minden, Nevada, a siren goes off every day at noon and 6 p.m. Members of the Washoe Tribe have been asking the town to silence the 6 p.m. siren because of its affiliation with a racist sundown ordinance that was in place for much of the 20th century. Read more
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To Roger Deakin, water was a miraculous substance. It was curative and restorative, it was beautiful in its flow, it was a lens through which he often viewed the world, and it was a medium of imagination and reflection. “All water,” he scribbled in a notebook, “river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think.” Read more
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A trove of manuscripts acquired from the Bronte family in the 19th century, all but unseen for the past century, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s. Read more
The humorous literary award known as the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year has been running since 1978, with past winners including Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (1986) by Glenn C. Ellenbogen, The Joy of Waterboiling (2018) by Achse Verlag and The Dirt Hole and its Variations by Charles L. Dobbins (2019). But we can go back centuries earlier to find their ancestors. The following are some of the more curious lurking in the corners of library catalogues. Read more
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was expected to earn more than $5 million from his book about leading New York during the coronavirus pandemic, according to figures released by his office on Monday, as investigators continued to look into his use of state resources to write and promote the book. Read more
In early experiments, a paralyzed man with implants in his premotor cortex typed 90 characters per minute—by envisioning he was writing by hand. Read more
A wealth of research comparing print and digital reading points to the same conclusion — print matters. For most students, print is the most effective way to learn and to retain that knowledge long-term. Read more
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During the Great Depression as part of the New Deal, Roosevelt established the FWP with the goal of providing work for writers, historians, librarians, editors, teachers and others. At its peak, the program employed more than 6,000 people nationwide. Read more
