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There’s Not an App for That, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Ernest_Hemingway_1950

Do you really want to write like this guy, anyway?

  • The last thing the world needs is another Hemingway imitator, but a new app purports to help you write like Ernest Hemingway. It lops off adverbs and corrects instances of passive voice, but “it’s pretty tricky to distill instructions into computer code and make a machine into an editor.” Phew. Job security.
  • Why are writers such inveterate procrastinators? “We were too good in English class.”
  • Another question: Why do literary biographers insist on portraying “a positive moral image” of their subjects, many of whom were ethically lax?
  • The Tournament of Cookbooks has begun. There will be blood. And bruised egos. And bold Mediterranean recipes.
  • An 1882 pamphlet—“The Nonsense of It!”—sunders the flimsy arguments against giving women the vote. “‘The polls are not decent places for women at present.’ Then she is certainly needed there to make them decent … the presence of one woman would be worth a dozen policemen.”