tetw:

A Tetw reading list

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard - Not reading is our main way of relating to most literature, find out how to make the most of your ignorance.

Tense Present by David Foster Wallace - In one of his finest essays, DFW reviews a dictionary of English usage, thereby tackling everything from democracy and free will to racism in academia.

The Rise of the Essay by Zadie Smith - Why do novelists write essays? And what excatly is an essay these days?

Words by Tony Judt - One of the very best essayists refelcts on his relationship with words.

The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’ by Tom Wolfe - Who put the ‘I’ in journalism? Tom Wolfe seems to think it was him and his friends.

Own Your Own Words by Steven Johnson - The ubiquity of Google has made it easy to gain control of a word or phrase, what effect is this new power having?

A Linguistic Big Bang by Lawrence Osborne - “For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth of a language, a complex sign system being created by deaf children in Nicaragua.”

Cyber-Neologoliferation by James Gleick - A guided tour through the strange world of the lexicographer.

The Language of the Future by Henry Hitchings - A fascinating look at how English is mutating as it becomes the world’s lingua franca.

Printed Words, Computers, and Democratic Societies by Irving Louis Horowitz - This essay from 1983 looks forward to the advent home copmuting and the “videotext revolution”.

djolawoffice:

It is easy to say, as Café Gratitude owners Matthew and Terces Engelhart did, that a civil lawsuit is “legalized extortion” when you are being sued. Café Gratitude, a popular California eatery with a half dozen or so locations in the state, is being sued for various wage and hour violations,…

clientsfromhell:

Client: “I see our facebook and Twitter icons on the site are not yet live, why not?”

Me: “Live? Oh, well you see, you actually need a facebook group or fan page and a Twitter account so we can link the icons to them. Remember I asked you to create those pages?”

Client: “We don’t want…

In the exhibition “Charles Dickens at 200,” at the Morgan Library, a trove of documents shows Dickens as a man responding to his times.

LIFE.com senior editor Michael Y. Park was a New York City journalist assigned to cover what he thought was a skyscraper fire on September 11, 2001. When he arrived at the scene and realized it was much more — that planes had crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and that the United States was under attack — he took out his point-and-shoot camera and snapped several photos capturing the events in lower Manhattan on that day.

Most of these have never been published or seen by the public before.

I just began taking martial arts classes (after a toe-dip in martial arts-based self-defense.) Sometimes I have to put forth real effort to ignore the macho! So, this profile is fascinating and inspiring.