"It was kind of a ‘you stuck your chocolate in my peanut butter!’ moment…"
- John Bemelmans MarcianoThe origin of ‘frisbee,’ and other linguistic fortuities.
Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, talks with NPR’s Melissa Block about secret documents concerning the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the months leading up and just after it.
Amazing stuff. Margaret Thatcher pleads with Gorbachev off the record to assist in keeping Germany divided—“You’ve got all those soldiers.” Brent Scowcroft muses that it might be better to keep two Germanys. Meanwhile Gorbachev was talking, apparently sincerely, about “our one European home,” and Shevardnadze said in a Politburo meeting that the Soviets should just tear down the wall themselves (he was ignored).
Read on →
Yesterday I caught myself employing usage I recall first hearing on cable news. A lot of expressions from mainstream or social media are fun, like shared jokes. The trick is knowing when to drop the joke. “WTF,” “fail,” “not so much”—aren’t they all getting to be like Top 40 hits you’ve heard one too many times?
But some usage sounds wrong from the start, and for me this was one of those cases—“concerning” as a synonym for “worrying” or “worrisome,” as in:
I find Johnny’s meth use concerning.
Gah, nails down a chalkboard, right? But is it incorrect, or am I simply unaccustomed to it?
Read on →This American Life finds that insurance companies can be both victims and the good guys, that more competition doesn’t necessarily mean lower prices, and that hedgehogs are CUTE.
If this is the result of a ceaseless quest for quirk, more quirk, please!
Family dinner was hugely important for all three of us… We would sit there, talking for hours long after the food was gone and… it’s when we all really sort of entered one each other’s lives in a really profound way
Terry Gross talks with Ruth Reichl about the end of Gourmet, Ruth’s latest (!) memoir, Not Becoming My Mother, and the new recipe book Gourmet Today. Ruth also details what she’d cook after a long day at the magazine (among other things: pasta with bacon and eggs).
NPR Morning Edition looks at David Meredith’s Hit Song Science:
“[It’s] a series of algorithms that we use to look at what’s the potential of a song to be sticky with a listener,” Meredith says. “To have those patterns in the music that would correspond with what human brain waves would find pleasing.”
Meredith says his software found that hits have certain common patterns of rhythm, harmony, chord progression, length and lyrics. A study conducted by the Harvard Business School found that the software was accurate 8 out of 10 times.
Pretty awesome. But New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones fears that such tools could result in quirky songs being passed by. He notes one song that people “just love” that the software gave only a 6 out of 10:
So I was listening to David Kestenbaum’s feature on the fight over access to the Medicare database, thinking how NPR news programs increasingly all sound like This American Life—somewhere between amused and amazed, with narration freely referencing the background sounds and interview clips interspersed by their excellent mix.
As Kestenbaum and the Medicare officials entered the database facility, there was the unmistakable creak of a door. So are we housing top-secret federal databases in buildings with old, creaky doors? Or was the creak added in the sound mix so the audience would get it—see, now we’re going inside? Either way, someone decided to include it. Oddly… cute. I suspect that, as with so many things, what’s technically possible is driving the sense of what’s appropriate.
Today NPR’s Morning Edition looks at the much-advertised premiere of Jay Leno’s 10pm show. I’d thought the idea for the show originated in NBC’s desire to fulfill Conan O’Brien’s contract and keep Jay happy, but, this being NBC, if it did, it’s turned into something else: another method of attracting more viewers while reducing costs. According to NPR, five hours of Jay will cost the same as one hour of the scripted dramas that still rule the 10pm airwaves.
As with all exchanges of goods and services, one person’s cost is another’s livelihood. Screenwriter and NPR commentator John Ridley notes that:
Read on →writers are suffering a near 50-percent unemployment rate, and year-to-year earnings are down almost 20 percent — the lowest level for both in five years.
…if you liked everything from Hill Street Blues to E.R. to Network to The English Patient, expect to see a lot less of the entertainment that’s more reliant on the strength of the written word
