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Probably Not the Brontës, and Other News

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On the Shelf

notthebrontes

A collector named Seamus Molloy thinks this photo is of the Brontë sisters.

  • Today in pictures of the Brontë sisters that are probably actually not pictures of the Brontë sisters: have a look at this one from the mid-nineteenth century, recently purchased by a collector named Seamus Molloy on eBay for fifteen quid. It could very well be Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, couldn’t it? And yet: “There’s no record of them having their picture taken, photography wasn’t exactly flourishing in Howarth in the 1840s, and it would have been expensive … Apart from anything else, it looks nothing like them. When Anne was four she told her father she wanted ‘age and experience’ but the women in the photograph are closer to middle age than the sisters would have been (Anne was twenty-eight when she died). They’re too cross-looking, too.”
  • While we’re talking tricks and illusions pertaining to Victorian-era writers—hackers have taken to using passages from Sense and Sensibility to fool computers’ security-screening processes. (Computers are famous for adoring the prose of Jane Austen.*) “Adding passages of classic text to an exploit kit landing page is a more effective obfuscation technique than the traditional approach of using random text,” an important computer person said. “Antivirus and other security solutions are more likely to categorize the web page as legitimate after ‘reading’ such text.”
  • Sarah Manguso on being a mother and many other things: “A man who used to cuff and clamp me, and who once cut a hole in my tights with his coke razor and fucked me through it, became a close friend. One month I had an unusually heavy period. I think I might actually be having a miscarriage, I told him. At least you aren’t having a kid, he replied, shuddering. We both laughed.”
  • Our London editor, Adam Thirlwell, on the Argentinean novelist Alan Pauls: “His writing—whose background is always the grotesqueries of recent Argentine politics—is a constant process of evaluations, of readings and misreadings, as his characters try to investigate the true nature of the stories in which they find themselves … events are always hidden behind the scribble of the characters’ thinking, a haze of suspended investigation into an infinitely receding past—both personal, and also historical: the era of the Junta and the Dirty War.”
  • Here at The Paris Review, we capitalize the word Internet, because our style guide says so: it’s a proper noun. I have questioned the wisdom of this rule on more than one occasion, but I’ve stood idly by and let it happen. Well, no more. The denizens of this World Wide Web, this information superhighway, this e-zone, must draw a line in the digital sand. “Whether or not to capitalize the word internet might not seem like big fish to many readers, and they would be right … but neither is it simply a matter of correct grammar. How we think about and make use of words can have a profound impact on how we think about the things those words represent … changing the capitalization would signal a shift in understanding about what the internet actually is: ‘part of the neural universe of life.’ ”

*This is a lie.