The excellent Longshot magazine, whose staff you’ll recognize from their day jobs at places like Gawker and The Awl, has just published its second issue. The depressingly appropriate theme is debt — and not just the financial kind. Michelle Legro, Maria Popova, and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton contributed the “Circles of Influence” map above, a sort of record of creative debt that manages to link Voltaire to Moby with only four degrees of separation and Issac Newton to J.J. Abrams in six. If you’re significantly intrigued to read more of Longshot – and you should — you can buy a print copy here or read it online and consider making a donation. [via Lapham's Quarterly]
Long considered the scourge of good writing, the adjective recently got another public flogging by Alexander McCall Smith in this Wall Street Journal article. Sure, most college students are guilty of inserting redundant, Thesaurus-aided descriptions to reach an essay’s minimum word count, but everyone from Voltaire to Steven King has agreed upon the danger of overusing this seductive part of speech. Although we’re not suggesting that linguistic minimalism should be the gold standard, it’s well-worth heeding the anti-adjective advice of these literary greats.
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“Your nature is to do evil; mine is to love the truth and publish it despite you.” This entry is from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry on Fate. On the 250th anniversary of the publication of Candide, Voltaire’s masterpiece attacking the philosophical doctrine of Optimism made popular by writers like Alexander Pope and Gottfried Leibniz, the New York Public Library has organized Candide at 250: Scandal and Success, examining the many forms and legacies of this bold, satirical tract.
Dr. Paul LeClerc is not only the president of the NYPL, but an integral part of the realization of this exhibition. Comprising borrowed elements but mainly representing a proud acquisition for the NYPL collection — they now own one of only two complete sets of all 17 “original” versions. We caught up with LeClerc on the eve of the opening to talk censorship, connoisseurship, and Catholic school.
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