Culture
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Language Corner — September 24, 2012 03:00 PM
Prepositions: the last word
Something to not put up with?
The purpose of last week’s posting was to warn against accepting supposedly famous quotations just because they’re repeated frequently. But the biggest reaction came over the supposed quotation from Winston Churchill, all versions of which end with “up with which I will not put.” A link to Ben Zimmer’s research made it clear that there is no definitive proof when...
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Full-Court Press — September 21, 2012 07:10 AM
The future of NFL Films looks bleak
With Steve Sabol's untimely death, there's no one to protect what he built from the cheapskates at NFL Network
Steve Sabol died on Tuesday from brain cancer at age 69. The president of, and artistic sensibility behind, NFL Films since the late 1960s, Sabol essentially created the myth and glamour of the modern National Football League, through the use of cinematography, music, wireless microphones, humor, poetry, and an innate belief that every football game was 60 minutes of savage...
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Full-Court Press — September 18, 2012 10:58 AM
Take one for the team
Football season is upon us, and so are its tried and true clichés
There is so much to love about football’s 24/7 ubiquity on television, but there is one (and only one) downside: the toxic exposure to clichés from the litany of former players and puny communications majors who analyze the game.
I’m not talking about “taking it one game at a time” or “it is what it is,” the crimes against...
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Language Corner — September 17, 2012 03:00 PM
Put up or shut up
‘Famous’ quotes that aren’t
Your child’s grade school teacher has asked her to come up with some “famous quotations,” so, naturally, she goes right to her computer and types in “famous quotations.”
The paper she turns in has some really famous ones, including this one, from Winston Churchill:
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which...
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Reality Check — September 17, 2012 06:50 AM
How to recount a plague
A new documentary about AIDS is the best one in the past few years
How to Survive A Plague is the best AIDS documentary I’ve seen. Why? Because it is important, yes, but so are so many other AIDS docs out this year and last, including Vito, HBO’s recent documentary about film scholar and gay activist Vito Russo, and We Were Here, 2011’s film about survivors of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco....
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Language Corner — September 12, 2012 06:50 AM
Swap mete
One word confused with another
Today, we’re going to list some words and phrases that are often used when another is meant. These are not words that have come to mean something else, the way “bemused” has morphed from meaning only “puzzled” to also meaning “wryly amused.” Instead, these are words that are mistakenly used for other words that sounds the same—a homophone or homonym,...
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Full-Court Press — September 4, 2012 12:26 AM
Local television and the Dodgers-Red Sox trade
Are the Dodgers loading up on stars in advance of a new local TV deal?
The words “local television” conjure images of infomercials, Seinfeld reruns, and lame repartee on cheesy newscasts, infomercials. But local television is also critically important in today’s baseball world, as further proven late last month when the Los Angeles Dodgers traded for the hefty contracts of Boston Red Sox underachievers and malcontents Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett. The stunning...
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Currents — September 4, 2012 12:24 AM
Language Corner
Few grudges
“Grudge,” from an old German word meaning “lament,” is a lot of fun to say. The noun “grudge” means “hostility or ill will against someone over a real or fancied grievance,” or the cause of that resentment, says Webster’s New World College Dictionary (Fourth Edition). “He bears a grudge because a woman was promoted instead of him” is one example.
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Language Corner — August 27, 2012 03:00 PM
Multiples choice
Some singular help with plural possessives
Last week we dealt with some possessive questions when there were plural possessors. Now we’ll deal with other possessives, which are more complex than they appear, and plural possessives. Because we’re trying to keep it simple, we’ll ignore that this part of speech is really the genitive case, indicating more than just possession, but we’ll stick with the basics, which...
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Reality Check — August 27, 2012 06:50 AM
Is Project Runway saving criticism?
It may well be, Reality Check columnist Alissa Quart says
This Thursday, I was watching an episode of the 10th season of the now ancient and seemingly irrelevant Lifetime show Project Runway: It was the one where fashion-challenged friends arrived for a humiliating makeover involving shiny fabrics. But watching it, I was reminded for the hundredth time that the show is one of last bastions of no-holds-barred criticism. That is:...
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Critical Eye — August 23, 2012 03:05 PM
Review: Dennis Drabelle’s The Great American Railroad War
How Frank Norris and Ambrose Bierce helped keep a crooked railroad honest
The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad | By Dennis Drabelle | St. Martin’s Press | 293 pages, $26.99
Though many of today’s American writers are politically aware and active, their modes of engagement tend to be indirect, their campaigns waged through personal essays, polemics, and oblique fiction. It...
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Language Corner — August 20, 2012 03:00 PM
Pluralistic
Those pesky possessives
Two of the longest sections in most grammar and style guides concern how to form plurals and how to form possessives. Some guidelines are identical—almost no plurals are formed with apostrophes, no matter how many “All Drink’s Half Price” signs you see—and some disagree: Is the possessive form of “Texas” rendered as “Texas’” or “Texas’s”? (We’ll deal with those next...
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Critical Eye — August 16, 2012 03:32 PM
Review: The Year of the Gadfly
A teenage journalist finds herself in Jennifer Miller’s resonant first novel
The Year of the Gadfly | By Jennifer Miller | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | 384 pages, $24.00
“Even Edward R. Murrow sometimes spoke in clichés, which only proves how ubiquitous and insidious they are,” quips Iris Dupont, intrepid teenage reporter, near the beginning of Jennifer Miller’s promising debut novel, The Year of the Gadfly. Iris, a winning and vulnerable teen...
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Language Corner — August 13, 2012 03:03 PM
Lucky strike
Not all fortunes are good
As Evan Jenkins wrote here in 1997, “fortuitous,” strictly speaking, does not mean “lucky”; it means “by chance.” So when a snake bites a mouse that just happened to be in its path, it is “fortuitous”—lucky for the snake, not so much for the mouse. Just an accident of timing.
But, possibly because “fortuitous” begins the same way as “fortunate”...
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Full-Court Press — August 13, 2012 02:56 PM
Drugs and the Olympics
What if reporters imbedded with athletes during training?
The first week of the Olympics is traditionally given over to complaints about NBC’s coverage, as we discussed last week. By the second week, the quadrennial controversy shifts to speculation about the use of illegal drugs by the winners.
This time around, attention focused on two athletes: Jamaican superstar Usain Bolt, who treats the sprints like a Sunday jog...
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Reality Check — August 13, 2012 06:50 AM
Collapsing the line between documentary and fiction
A new film, The Ambassador, exhibits "performance journalism," a combination of art and reporting
This week, you can on-demand a documentary that uses insanely unorthodox methods to get at the truth and judge for yourself whether this approach is acceptable for nonfiction, or not. The film in question is by Danish director Mads Brugger. The Ambassador restyles investigative journalism and documentary into something we could call “performance journalism,” a one-of-a-kind combination of performance art,...
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Language Corner — August 6, 2012 04:28 PM
Shhh! It doesn’t matter
A “moot” discussion
The silence is deafening. All over the Internet and printed publications, people are making “mute points”:
• A press release promises small businesses that “one of the benefits of online marketing is that your geography becomes a mute point.” (If no one can hear your business, can anyone find it?)
• A letter to the editor about a topless protest...
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Full-Court Press — August 6, 2012 11:11 AM
ESPN’s Tim Tebow lovefest
Shut out of the Olympics, the 'Worldwide Leader In Sports' puts NFL front and center
US sports coverage last week was split neatly into two distinct, Jungian halves, represented by those sportscasting sweethearts, married couple Dan Hicks and Hannah Storm. Hicks works for NBC, and called the swimming competition at the London Olympics. His enthusiastic descriptions of Michael Phelps and Missy Franklin winning gold appeared only on tape delay during prime time, a four-hour show...
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Critical Eye — August 6, 2012 11:00 AM
Behind Big Oil, the original big business
A review of Steve Coll’s Private Empire
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power | By Steve Coll | Penguin Press HC | 704 pages, $36
When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010, reporters were thrown into the deep end of the oil and gas industry—again. Twenty-two years earlier, another catastrophic spill shocked the country and changed the industry:...
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The Kicker — August 3, 2012 06:50 AM
Required skimming: literary criticism
This month, CJR presents “Required Skimming,” a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions, ranging from finance to food. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments.
• Arts and Letters Daily: One of the oldest—and still one of the best—hand-curated aggregators of smart cultural essays and book reviews.
• Publishers Weekly: Unmatched in the breadth of its books coverage. A must-read for anyone interested in new releases.
• New York Daily News Page Views: I'm pretty sure we had the name first, but the Daily News's books blog, under the capable editorship of Alexander Nazaryan, more than does it proud.
• Los Angeles Review of Books: A great, comprehensive new online-only books site, where big names and complete unknowns write some of the most thought-provoking reviews around.
• Identity Theory: Matt Borondy's site runs solid reviews and great author interviews. Don't miss the extensive interview archive, reaching back to 2000.
• Open Letters Monthly: Engaging, entertaining long- and short-form culture coverage.
• Barnes and Noble Review: Remember back in the day, when Amazon used to run really great original books content? Barnes and Noble still does that! Don't scoff: It's smart, worthwhile stuff.
• Bookforum: A wonderful omnibus lit site from the long-running print magazine.
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