Allow me to present a hypothesis: Dan Brown is the Anne Hathaway of authors. Hard-working, serious about his craft (even if others aren't), with lots and lots of money to show for his work. And people love to hate him as much, and sometimes even more, than they love to love him.
For every baby name there shall be a handgun, Heidi Klum is dating her bodyguard, Miss USA denies Lochte love, Bob Dylan invokes the p-word, and Blake and Ryan's no-longer-secret wedding secrets are out.
Here's a handy compendium of additional crutch words, those verbal (and sometimes written) pause words that we just can't seem to help using, even as we know we shouldn't. You know?
The yoga business can be as cutthroat as any other, and the battle de jour this time is over pants. Specifically, Lululemon is accusing Calvin Klein of having ripped off a signature waistband.
Today in The Wall Street Journal Sue Shellenbarger discusses a type of coworker you've surely had the occasion to work with, assuming you've been working in an office environment for any time at all. This is, Shellenbarger writes, the "workplace whiner."
The New York Times' After Deadline blog contains a fantastic letter to the paper's editor from March of 1924 that reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same, copy-wise and otherwise.
We've changed a lot in the decade-plus that's ensued since nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001, and the world became forever different.
Ten years after someone first wrote a Wikipedia entry for Philip Roth's best-selling novel The Human Stain, published in 2000, the great author has discovered the latest entry and he is not happy. As with many Wikipedia articles, this one includes details that are not wholly agreed upon by all—or, necessarily, any—of those involved.
Candy corn is neither beast nor fowl, neither corn nor candy. And yet, it possesses such potent favorability, in fact, at least among the people of Nabisco and Kraft Foods, that they are offering a limited-edition Oreo with a candy-corn flavored-and-colored filling
Soon there will be pumpkins in the streets and root veggies in the green markets; Halloween decorations in the drugstores; an array of soups available from your lunchtime establishment; a certain renewed vigor in the air. Better prepare for fall while you still can. Here's how.
Joe Biden said literally quite literally a lot last night, which was fodder for much semantic mockery around the Internet. If there's one thing moderately word-nerdy folks (folks, he said that, too) hate, it's the repeated and possibly improper use of one of those crutch words.
One of the highly anticipated Y.A. novels this fall is by 22-year-old debut author Jessica Khoury. Out this week from Penguin's Razorbill imprint, it's called Origin, and, with the film rights acquired by Scott Steindorff, it's getting a lot of buzz. It may even be your Hunger Games replacement read of the season.
Fourteen years ago there was a sex scandal that rocked our nation to its core. In the wake of Bill Clinton's speech at the DNC, it rears rears its increasingly tepid head yet again. Lewinsky is a long legacy for former President Bill Clinton, but it's also a rather impotent one.
You might say, haven't there always been men's departments? Do not underestimate the power of the new gender-based selling. As Eric Wilson writes in the New York Times, "it would seem that the fight for gender equality has finally come to the place where one might least expect it."
There's much to learn about the way we dine from a piece in today's New York Times by Susanne Craig. It follows an awesome linguistic restaurant chart from Ben Schott that appeared in the paper in early August listing a variety of the terms and acronyms assorted restaurant waitstaff use to describe guests.
Judy Blume, formative author for generations of girls and boys, is 74. She's still writing and she's still teaching us lessons, this time, about breast cancer in the form of a blog post, that went up today, titled !@#$% Happens.
Much of the Internet appeared awash with love for Michelle Obama last night, and today, as the analyses of her speech at the Democratic National Convention come through, there is more praise, much of it dealing with Michelle as the self-dubbed "mom-in-chief."
People, people, people. We realize some of you are very eager to wed one another, and that you want to do it in the right way. You know, by asking in the most visible and obvious fashion that shows the world how much you really do care. While this is a lovely gesture, you should stop.
September brings some shifts in the world of women's magazines. Joanna Coles, Marie Claire's editor in chief since 2006, has been named the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, replacing Kate White, who helmed the world's largest women's magazine for 14 years and is leaving to focus on her established writing and speaking career.
We spoke to Sophie Morgan, the pseudonymous author of the book being described as the "real" Fifty Shades of Grey, about the inevitable comparisons to the best-selling trilogy and what she hopes to accomplish with her memoir, Diary of a Submissive.
Would an apple by another name taste as sweet, or so free of antibiotics, so nutritious and healthful? Or would it taste exactly the same, but just cost more? Such were the concerns of Stanford University doctors who researched whether organic foods are actually better.
We're breaking up with Summer, and moving on to Fall. We'll always have the memories, though—at least, of the things that we remember.
Enough of you have gotten in touch to admit your own book-reading characteristics that we feel the Diagnostics Guide deserves an addendum. Herewith, many more types of book readers. Let us know if we left you out.
Yesterday brought us a rumor (via The New York Post) that Beverly Hills 90210's Kelly and Dylan, or Jennie Garth and Luke Perry, might actually be an item IRL. We can dream! While we're dreaming, we're going to dream big. Here are the other TV couples we want to see to forever and ever, onscreen or off.
Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, has died at the age of 67, apparently of natural causes, The New York Times' Margolit Fox.
We've been reading review copies all summer, and with the help of some bookseller friends, have compiled this fall preview of teen-and-younger books you won't want to miss.
Let no one say that hipsters are not entrepreneurial. If the new "organic" cigarette for people who ride fixies is any indication, hipsters are very much entrepreneurial indeed, and they do not want to smoke garbage.
Paramount Pictures and the son of Mario Puzo, the creator of The Godfather, are in a turf war over the literary rights to the franchise, reports the Associated Press.
The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog includes a book-reader coinage that got us thinking about our reading styles. There, Mark O'Connell confesses his dirty little reading secret: He doesn't finish books; he's a "promiscuous reader." We can think of some other types of book readers, too. Which are you?
In the best case scenario, a storm is never named. It putters out well before it reaches land, or if on land, it's just a lot of rain, a regular annoying damp day but nothing dangerous, definitely not a hurricane, and no one is any the wiser. Other times storms start small and rise to an occasion of terror, becoming quite powerful and doing dreadful things. And we insist on naming them.
Since we outsourced math to the machines, we do a lot less active math in our daily lives. Who's really bearing the brunt of all this math-apathy or, sometimes, even math-fear? The children. The children are not learning the math.
Donald Trump's tweet that Arianna Huffington "is unattractive both inside and out" reminds us that there are good ways and bad ways to deliver a pithy online retort. His is the latter.
On the Internet, everyone can have an opinion. It is in this place, where backlash can beget backlash on both sides, for those criticized as well as those doling out the negative comments, that the book review now exists. Call it the new equality, for good or for bad. It's not nice and it's not mean, but it is a free for all.
Americans of a certain age who grew up on the Muppets often adore the Swedish Chef, but many actual Swedes hate the dude, or, really, really dislike him. He may not even be Swedish. Who is this Muppet, anyway?
Earlier this month, an issue of Chicago Reader's Mike Sula proclaimed that the meat of the climbing, scurrying, nut-eating mammals that urbanites encounter daily was the "Chicken of the Trees." Well, New York City has squirrels, too.
It is hard to go from cultural darling to elder statesman. That, essentially, is the takeaway from Alex Williams' piece in the New York Times reflecting upon how a bunch of formerly cool-kid Gen Xers feel about having one of their cohort, Paul Ryan, 42, running for vice president.
Your best-kept dating secrets are not so secret after all. According to Ellen McLaughlin's recent sociological study in the New York Post, the waitstaff and bartenders and managers at any number of New York City restaurants and bars (and then some) are on to your techniques.
Your typical literary reading is not a thing that tends to lead to physical fights and broken glasses. But at last night's Vol. 1 Brooklyn, what was shaping up to be a harmonious meeting of literary minds turned into something a bit more dramatic.
On July 20 we woke up to the news that a 24-year-old man had killed 12 people and wounded countless others in a shooting at the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. That July 20 was a summer Friday, like today. Today, there's another shooting.
If the frequency of word usage "related to moral excellence and virtue" in the Google Books archive is to be believed, America is in a steep moral decline.
Today in the New York Daily News, with enough time to give you plenty of room for discourse prior to your Benedict-and-Bloodies date tomorrow—say, 1-ish? No sense having to get up too early!—Alexander Nazaryan writes that we need to get rid of brunch, because brunch is, he says, ruining America.
Random House of Canada has launched Hazlitt, a new online magazine that's part of the publisher's revamped digital strategy. This is no Fox News Magazine.
The Giver is one of the books you probably read as a kid, somewhere between late elementary or middle school and early high school, depending on your school and curriculum. Two of us hadn't, though, and finally did.
We got pretty excited about the new words added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary recently, so it's only fair that we muster the same enthusiasm for the terms Oxford has unveiled in their quarterly update of new words and meanings.
Today The New York Times offers some solutions to an issue of etiquette that you may have confronted this summer, or perhaps another time of year, if you're popular or have a great house in a great location. Are people always wanting to stay with you, and you don't want them to, and you don't know what to do about it?
What's better, the book or the movie? Can the movie ever be as good as the book? The debate is an age-old one, probably existing since the very first screenplay was derived from a popular work, because when we fall in love with books we typically fall hard.
There's a word we keep seeing in the news of late, a word it seems like we weren't supposed to say in mixed company, much less in "family" newspapers. Now it's everywhere—or, at least, in way more places than it used to be.
Recently, we learned that just about the worst thing a person could ever do in a bar is to—I don't even want to say it—order that foul concoction, the mojito. Whatever to drink instead?
We feel strongly about the punctuation we interact with in our daily lives. Today, we learn something about the @ that we did not know, leading us to wonder about the personality traits of our other favorite grammatical marks?
It seems we're always going on about the hows and whys and what's of the contemporary twentysomething, as evidenced in recent reactions to The New York Times' piece on Emma Koenig's blog to the many "thoughtful" or "navel-gazing" (or both) posts on Thought Catalog.
Investigative journalist Richard Miniter has a new book out today, Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him, in which he claims Barack Obama is "fully vetted" for the first time in history. He also claims Obama has been heavily influenced in his decision-making by women.
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