A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)
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If you’ve ever tried to cancel your Amazon Prime subscription and found the process frustratingly complex, that’s by design, writes Jon Brodkin in Ars Technica. According to a Federal Trade Commission suit filed this month, Amazon named its “labyrinthine” cancellation process Iliad, “a reference to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War.” (Hat tip: Howard Mittelmark)
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How quickly can you guess the medical condition described in a Wikipedia article in which most of the words are blanked out? That’s the challenge of Wordectomy, a new game from MedPageToday. I used to read medical journals as part of my journalism work, and I still had a hard time. (Hat tipi: Language Log)
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Thinking about publishing an e-book on Kindle? Mike Pope has some tips for you based on his own recent experience.
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Safety instructions often look as though they were written by either lawyers or engineers, for other lawyers or engineers. This admirable bit of plain English is how they should be written. pic.twitter.com/eqvIRiNZza
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene) June 24, 2023
(Related: I’ll have a review of Lane Greene’s new book, Writing with Style, next week.)
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“An NFL policy prohibits players from endorsing alcoholic beverages. So Coors found a linguistic work-around.” (Mark Liberman on Language Log)
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Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms Site (DOOFAS). I knew about WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) but not about WISEASS (Weizmann Institute of Science Experimental Astrophysics Spectroscopy System). (Via Kottke Quick Links)
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It’s been the Year of the Product-Centric Movie (see: BlackBerry, Air, Flamin’ Hot, Tetris). Next month brings Barbie, a live-action feature film about the doll and her pals, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie in the title role. Three language-y takes:
- Barbie shares a release date (July 21) with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. Thus: Barbenheimer. Yes, there are T-shirts.
- The French-language tagline for Barbie can be read as a naughty double entendre: “She can do everything. Him, he just knows how to fuck”. The Hollywood Reporter says it’s no accident: “It’s definitely deliberate; there’s no way a French speaker wouldn’t have noticed the dirty pun,” a French marketing executive told the publication.
“Lui, c’est juste Ken”
- A six-decade tour of Barbie Dreamhouses, by Julie Lasky for the New York Times (gift article). “Barbie’s house is infinitely more exciting than Barbie herself,” writes cultural critic Elvia Wilk in a new 151-page monograph on the Dreamhouse, published by Mattel in collaboration with the design magazine POP-UP. “The structures we live within — fantasize about living within — say more about our lives and dreams than plastic bodies ever will.”
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Software engineer and music composer Mauricio Costas is writing a gospel-hip-hop musical about the rise and fall of Silicon Valley Bank. TechCrunch reports that “[v]enture capitalists play the role of ‘preachers,’ startups play the role of ‘naïve churchgoers,’ and the Valley Bank CEO ‘Greg’ (obviously a take on former Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker) has a big role,”
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