{"id":70056,"date":"2014-04-21T09:28:02","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T13:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70056"},"modified":"2014-04-21T15:07:23","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T19:07:23","slug":"a-nation-of-postcards-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/21\/a-nation-of-postcards-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"A Nation of Postcards, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_70057\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/maine.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-70057\" class=\"wp-image-70057\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/maine-1024x657.jpg\" alt=\"maine\" width=\"600\" height=\"385\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-70057\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Image: Boston Public Library<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>On that ever-mysterious rubric, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/booksblog\/2014\/apr\/21\/literary-fiction-clever-marketing-genre-debate\" target=\"_blank\">literary fiction<\/a>\u201d: \u201cIt was clever marketing by publishers to set certain contemporary fiction apart and declare it Literature\u2014and therefore Important, Art, and somehow better than other writing \u2026 Jane Austen&#8217;s works are described as literary fiction. This is nonsense \u2026 Austen never for a moment imagined she was writing Literature. Posterity decided that\u2014not her, not John Murray, not even her contemporary readership. She wrote fiction, to entertain and to make money.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>The French economist Thomas Piketty has alighted upon our shores, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Capital-Man\/146059\" target=\"_blank\">like a wonkish heir to de Tocqueville<\/a>, to tell Americans how to salvage what he called their \u2018egalitarian pioneer ideal\u2019 from a potentially devastating \u2018drift toward oligarchy.\u2019\u201d<\/li>\n<li>A salve for irritated prescriptivists: this new browser extension literally <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/future_tense\/2014\/04\/18\/literally_chrome_browser_extension_replaces_literally_with_figuratively.html\" target=\"_blank\">replaces every instance of <em>literally<\/em> with <em>figuratively<\/em><\/a>, all over the Internet.<\/li>\n<li>Gillette\u2019s new razor does violence to the spirit of entrepreneurship: \u201cIt\u2019s a men&#8217;s razor that does what every other men\u2019s razor since time immemorial has done\u2014removes hair from your face\u2014but with \u2018a swiveling ball-hinge\u2019 that the company says will make it easier to get a clean shave \u2026 The razor represents <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intelligencer\/2014\/04\/gillettes-razor-everything-wrong-with-america.html?mid=twitter_nymag\" target=\"_blank\">everything terrible about America\u2019s innovation economy<\/a>.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Online, the Boston Public Library has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.formerdays.com\/2014\/04\/postcards-from-america-part-one.html?utm_content=bufferf6ab3&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer\" target=\"_blank\">more than 25,000 U.S. postcards<\/a> from the thirties and forties, all of them vividly illustrated.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On that ever-mysterious rubric, \u201cliterary fiction\u201d: \u201cIt was clever marketing by publishers to set certain contemporary fiction apart and declare it Literature\u2014and therefore Important, Art, and somehow better than other writing \u2026 Jane Austen&#8217;s works are described as literary fiction. This is nonsense \u2026 Austen never for a moment imagined she was writing Literature. Posterity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[8906,7002,11608,13609,13612,13611,13610],"class_list":["post-70056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-alexis-de-tocqueville","tag-genre-fiction","tag-literally","tag-literary-fiction","tag-postcards","tag-razor-blades","tag-thomas-piketty"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Morning News Roundup for April 21, 2014<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A nation of postcards, a new browser extension literally replaces every instance of literally with figuratively, and other news.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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