About Editing and Writing

Early Hominids
by Faith Shearin

In one museum scene they are bent over fire
and in another they hold their first stone tools
while the ice age approaches. They have been
painting mastodons and mammoths
in their caves, art already in their animal grasp,
and they have been leaving footprints
in volcanic ash, shedding their skeletons
in deserts. They have begun the journey
from trees to suburbs, have been dressing
themselves in early hats and considering
an alphabet. The young neanderthal looks like
a boy who bit you on the playground
and the woman beside him might be the woman
we avoid at the grocery store. This is evolution:
hair loss, math, a desire for furniture. Already
they worry about predators and weather; already
they have designs for a more comfortable bed.

From a story, “BuzzFeed Shows Signs of a Rebound,” by Lucas L. Alpert in the Wall Street Journal:

BuzzFeed has worked to stabilize itself after a tumultuous period last year in which it laid off 250 people following an annual loss that people familiar with the matter said was greater than $50 million.

This week’s Style Invitational in the Washington Post asked readers “to tell us some events that will (not really) occur in the coming year.” Some winning entries:

April 23: Focusing on players who will be seeing the most action, the Redskins draft punters in the first three rounds. (Mike Gips, Bethesda, Md.)

May 16: Concerns about covert pressure on Ukraine flare up anew when President Volodymyr Zelensky, reading from a script, calls Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

June 18: The Republican National Committee buys 300,000 copies of Donald Trump Jr.’s new book, “Nepotism for Dummies.” (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)

During a recent trip to Stockholm, I came across a new collection of stories and essays by Tove Jansson in a bookstore. Though Jansson is perhaps best known as the creator of the Moomin series, her writing for adults is vast and varied. I have translated two of the essays from that new collection into English for the first time. The first, “The Island,”  appeared on this site yesterday. The second, “Once, at a park,” is a beautifully scattered, rhapsodic piece that defies genre conventions. Again, there are torsions in time and tense; again, the syntax can be somewhat shattered—and (again) there is a joyful disregard for the boundaries separating fiction, memoir, and essay. I have tried to retain, for the most part, the slight disquiet and disorientation the original sometimes conveys, because this carefully crumbling prose is directly related to the content of the piece.

Dan Wang is a technology writer; an excerpt from his 2019 letter about the future:

Science fiction is uniquely capable of provoking imagination for radically better futures. By radically better, I mean far more than progress on a few technologies and social problems. Instead I like the idea of books that sketch out humanity 5,000 years from now after we’ve made major advances in energy, materials science, space, and in civilizing humanity. I’m advocating to treat science fiction as a political project, to spur a better vision of the future as well as the hard work to make it reality.

Some conclusions from an article, “When political incorrect language promotes authenticity,” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Political correctness is “using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others’ feelings, especially those others who seem socially disadvantaged.”

One pilot study demonstrate that being politically incorrect makes communicators appear more authentic—specifically, less susceptible to external influence.

Using politically incorrect language made a communicator appear particularly authentic among conservative perceivers but particularly cold among liberal perceivers.

Together, these findings demonstrate when and how using politically incorrect language can enhance a person’s authenticity.

I have a deep abiding love for the Peanuts characters. They stand out as perfectly real to me in the same way that Emma Bovary, Holden Caulfield, Gregor Samsa, and Charlotte the spider do. I was a socially awkward child, and the daily plight of Charlie Brown said something to me. I understood in a profoundly personal way the guaranteed failure that made up his world. It was my world, too. . . .

From a New York Times story “Sonny Mehta, Knopf Editor, Remembered by His Writers.”

Sonny Mehta, the Indian-born, Cambridge-educated editor who for more than 30 years presided over Alfred A. Knopf and the New York publishing scene with seemingly effortless grace and erudition, died on Monday at 77. Mehta published Nobelists and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as first-time authors, and here he is remembered by some of the writers whose careers he shaped.

From New Year’s resolutions for the media by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell: