She was the hottest wool dyer in Tyre, and something of a big-noter too, telling the ancient world she could outweave any chump in a tapestry slamdown – even Athena, the goddess of weaving.
Well, Athena was not so chuffed. Disguised as a crone, the deity warned Arachne off her trash-talk but the dyer of Tyre [...]
He surfed. He ribbed. But most of all he loved the power of the written word, how a clean phrase could capture a sporting moment as vividly as any celluloid or digicam.
Greg Hunter was my first mentor of journalism, the bloke who dared me to tell stories in a magazine – his magazine – the [...]
Crossword setters are solvers too. It’s not just seeing what tricks the Joneses are pulling (which is an important part of the habit), but the habit itself. How else do you think I fell into this racket without an urge to gobble cryptic puzzles?
But that’s not to say I crack each grid in three minutes [...]
If the title of this post doesn’t whet your trivia appetite, then odds-on Mental Floss is not your kinda magazine. Where else on the newsstand can you nibble articles about The World’s Laziest Inventions, The History of Hacky Sack, and How Pirates Shaped American Democracy?
And that’s just the March/April edition. Online you can test your [...]
Literary non-fiction. Sensory journalism. Long feature-writing. Call the genre what you wish, but the masters of this sustained narrative form are doubtless the Americans.
Ira Glass – which is not a batty book author – confirms the wealth in a new anthology of magazine excellence, The New Kings of Non-Fiction. Released by Penguin in the US, [...]
Elizabeth Little is the poster girl of grammar. Showing no fear, this young Candian has waded into the world’s dictionaries, seeking out the quirkier rules of language. Stuff like:
+ how any number after three in Sanskrit,is plenty enough;
+ the tonal dangers of the Chinese word cao, which depending on your palate can means grass or [...]