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It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you’re in trouble and that maybe there’s a coverup.

Rebecca Solnit, “The Case of the Missing Perpetrator: On Mysterious Pregnancies, the Passive Voice, and Disappearing Men”

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the past exonerative tense, illustrated

Both nouns are now equally implicated...

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Future Reading

Containers matter. They shape stories and the experience of stories. Choose the right binding, cloth, trim size, texture of paper, margins and ink, and you will strengthen the bond between reader and text. Choose badly and the object becomes a wedge between reader and text. —Craig Mod at Aeon

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How a New Yorker copy editor learned to love house style.

There is a fancy word for “going beyond your province”: “ultracrepidate.” So much of copy editing is about not going beyond your province. Anti-ultracrepidationism. Writers might think we’re applying rules and sticking it to their prose in order to make it fit some standard, but just as often we’re backing off, making exceptions, or at least trying to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little. 

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Until lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Chinua Achebe (via jessehimself)

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In museums, we care about both perceived authenticity and real authenticity. We want the power of the story--and the facts to back it up. This can come off as contradictory. We want visitors to come experience "the real thing" or "the real site," appealing to the spiritual notion that the personhood in the original artifact connotes a special value. At the same time, we don't always tell folks that what they are looking at is a replica, a simulation, or a similar object to the thing they think they are seeing. 

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Getting into the mind of someone who is not you.

Much of my work involves writing about scenes set far in the future or deep in the past. How to immerse oneself in the moment-to-moment nature of a time and place you’ve never personally experienced—and perhaps cannot?

Well, I would put a question to you. What’s the difference between you and your great great great-grandfather? What makes you different?

I think the answer is this: What you take for granted.

What you take for granted about your life, about your rights, about people around you. About ethnicity, gender, sexuality, work, God. Your relationship with the state. The state’s obligations and duties to you: Health care, education, recreation. What you take for granted about all these things is I think what marks one culture from from another, and one generation from another.

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Thinking critically about the mythologies of creativity, the cliches they give rise to, and the stereotypes those cliches perpetuate:

Collectors Weekly: How much does the idea of the blues as this wild, devilish, or lawless music have to do with the idea of otherness?

Petrusich: I’m so guilty of this sometimes, too, but there’s this way that we want to talk about blues music as an anguished cry. In many cases, it is that. You hear these songs, and they’re incredibly moving. But when we talk about it as being raw or authentic, it discounts just how hard this stuff was to play and how musically sophisticated and innovative it was. There’s a sense of almost remarginalizing it by talking about it as this primitive music that sprung up in the cotton fields, when in fact, it’s incredibly skilled and impressive music.

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Writing Tips from the CIA

Keep the language crisp and pungent; prefer the forthright to the pompous and ornate.

Do not stray from the subject; omit the extraneous, no matter how brilliant it may seem or even be.

Favor the active voice and shun streams of polysyllables and prepositional phrases.

Keep sentences and paragraphs short, and vary the structure of both.

Be frugal in the use of adjectives and adverbs; let nouns and verbs show their own power.

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Traité des couleurs – L’ancêtre du guide Pantone en 1692

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The themes of “Gone With the Wind” are reflected in these houses, Modlin says of the Southern plantations he’s studied. “If you tour enough of them—I’ve toured more than 100—a constant narrative is this tragic loss. And yet, it’s a tragic loss for whom? Again, we’re making the conscious or subconscious decision—as a region, as a nation—saying, ‘This is who we want to identify with in the past,’ and not thinking about how the loss of that slavery-based plantation system meant the freedom of 4 million people. What we could frame as loss could also be framed as the first steps of gain, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that narrative at a plantation house.”

Lisa Hix, “Why Aren't Stories Like '12 Years a Slave' Told at Southern Plantation Museums?”