Wonderful post on the terminology of numeral and punctuation typography:
In “Emoticons During Wartime,” a recent article in The New Yorker (December 10, 2007), Tom McNichol documents the usefulness of emoticons in communicating by visual innuendo. Emoticons can mean whatever the writer and reader want them to mean, until, of course the meaning is explicitly defined [...]
Non-letter typography
April 25th, 2008 · No Comments
Tags: · editing and words · geek · typography
Making the big time?
January 23rd, 2008 · 1 Comment
Who knew the Utne site had blogs? They do, including one on spirituality, and we made it with a story I put in our Winter 2007 “Reflections” section: Suicide, Faith, and Compassion
Kate Braestrup encountered this sad reality in her work as a chaplain for game wardens, an experience she recounts in an excerpt from her [...]
Tags: · editing and words · work
Lippmann and the News
December 15th, 2007 · No Comments
The Nation has a review of Liberty and the News by Walter Lippmann. It (the book!) was written in 1920, but it sounds like it has a lot to say for today.
“There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
Tags: · books · current affairs · editing and words · journalism
Watching Wikipedia
November 1st, 2007 · 1 Comment
Sometimes Andrew Sullivan links to the most amazing things: WikipediaVision (beta)
Tags: · editing and words · international
An elitist criticises the state of criticism
September 1st, 2007 · 3 Comments
Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discovered a blog written by board members of the National Book Critics Circle. They have a guest post: Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today. I like some of the points he makes, and I too lament the falling-away of book reviews in major newspapers. I can’t help thinking [...]
Tags: · books · editing and words
In praise of editors
July 24th, 2007 · 1 Comment
You’ll need to watch an ad to get a one-day pass if you don’t already subscribe to Salon, but this essay made my day: Let us now praise editors
I’ve also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I’d insisted [...]
Tags: · editing and words
Article on Quakers in Second Life
June 14th, 2007 · No Comments
My article on Quakers in Second Life has been published in the June issue of 2Life Magazine (pdf download).
Tags: · editing and words · Quakerism · Virtual Worlds
A book review to dream about
May 24th, 2007 · No Comments
As an editor who receives many unsolicited books for review, I sometimes dream of writing a book review like this one from the New York Times: An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.
On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.â€
And you would be spectacularly wrong.
Tags: · books · editing and words
UU Church in Second Life member interviews
March 9th, 2007 · No Comments
Longer excerpts of the interviews I conducted with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life have been published as a companion to the story I wrote. The excerpts include one interview that was cut from the edited story.
Tags: · current affairs · editing and words · religion
My article on uuworld.org
February 19th, 2007 · 1 Comment
I wrote the article now featured on the uuworld.org home page: Religious reality in a virtual world.
A dragon, an angel, and a bug-eyed monster sit down in a Unitarian Universalist church. No, it’s not the beginning of a bad joke. If you’re in the popular online world of Second Life, it may just be a [...]
Tags: · editing and words · religion
