“Those who unfeelingly push and jostle one another all the rest of the year smile on each other today, tell of the dangers they escaped, exchange addresses, and walk along with new friends. The squares are mountains of snow over which the icy lacework clinging like filigree to the branches of the trees glitters in the morning sun.”
—José Martí, “New York Under the Snow” (1888)
I’d put my money on this: it’s just a matter of minutes before Fox News starts a feedback loop about how today’s Nobel announcement brings shame to America. (I wonder if there are people running virtual office pools using PayPal.)
It turns out the insanity that takes hold of the news cycle in August (angry health care haters, birthers, shark attacks) was identified in the late nineteenth century. The British call it Silly Season, and in Germany it’s Pickle Time.
While newspapers and magazines elsewhere are cutting back on crosswords, the Harrisburg Patriot-News is adding more puzzles to the paper.
Now the bad: they’re adding sudoku and KenKen®.
I’m quoted in the article and, FYI: I do not say “play crosswords.”
Anne Trubek, writing for Good magazine online, asks if crosswords are destined to go the way of the newspaper. (Along the way she mentions my skepticism about the ability of crosswords to protect us from dementia.) I think her question is worth asking. Her post has prompted more than 70 comments and counting, many in vehement disagreement.
If the cover story in this weekend’s N.Y. Times magazine seems familiar, that’s because the paper ran essentially the same piece on its front page in November of 2007.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine what the editors were thinking when they commissioned the current article. For sure, Steven Pinker is a brand-name author, but it’s not as if the first go-around failed to grab attention: it was part of a series that earned the reporter, Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole thing is that both articles share identical headlines.
Clearly, the paper’s institutional memory spans less than 14 months.
In the bad old days when a newspaper archive was kept on paper–in a filing cabinet, in the morgue, in the basement–such a thing might be understandable. But a blunder as big as this one makes me wonder: don’t they have Internet access in the newsroom?
Or did it give up on me?
from my riff on Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.
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New, original reporting in sound by my grad students, at The End of the Dial. They’ve got some pretty cool stuff going on, including, this week, a piece from Upper Darby, PA, on the “reverse Bradley effect.”
Author of FROM SQUARE ONE: A MEDITATION, WITH DIGRESSIONS, ON CROSSWORDS - hardcover from Scribner and spoken-word adaptation (with rich sound design and original music) from Random House Audio.
