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Boston Globe
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In defense of the em dash
There are But as some have Advertisement ChatGPT's writing is the product of the 90 Pulitzer Prize nominees from 1924 to 2020, 95 bestsellers from The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly in the same timeframe, and other works it was If you're feeling unsure about how to use the punctuation mark, the em dash (—) can be used to set off extra information — like a Shakespearean aside — in the middle of a longer passage. It functions like — and can be used instead of — commas or parentheses. With an em dash, you can rise above an ordinary train of thought as if on an observation deck — wow! Advertisement Citing one piece of punctuation to judge whether something has been written by artificial intelligence is dangerous. It could lead to teachers grading their students improperly or prospective hires being rejected. After all, great writers have used the em dash throughout history. In 'Mrs. Dalloway,' Virginia Woolf combined em dashes with semicolons and sprinkled them like seeds on the breeze: 'How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?' — was that it? — 'I prefer men to cauliflowers' — was that it?' The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once went comedically overboard in his journal to prove a point: 'I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself,' wrote Kierkegaard. Advertisement Being em-dash-happy isn't a style that ChatGPT invented, and we shouldn't give it credit for that. Real em dash fans have been singing its praises online for years. 'The em dash can also usurp the semicolon's glory — for it shows more than equality! The em dash has its own veritable inflection — its own tempo! One can use it profusely to show excitement and dynamism of thought,' — long before ChatGPT made its Kool-Aid-man-esque entrance into our lives. Now the em dash might need our help. A new generation of writers must feel free to use the fanciful — if sort of funky looking — punctuation in peace. It's there to let them set their creative impulses free. As one poster I use the em dash because it allows me to construct sentences — castles of thought, really — that contain unexpected, experimentally jazzy multitudes. Long story short — they're fun. I will not let ChatGPT — the 'helpful' roommate who dyes all your white socks beige in the wash of literature — make writing less fun.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Book excerpt: 'Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood'
Photo by Getty Images. The following is an excerpt from the recently published 'Disciples of White Jesus.' In its description, Publisher's Weekly says, 'A shifting American culture is pushing white Christian boys toward radicalization, isolation, and violence, according to this persuasive treatise.' Consider buying the book at an independent Minnesota bookstore. We cannot understand the problems of radicalization among young, white Christian boys in America, nor fully grapple with the challenges and troubles facing these boys, without understanding what's happening in American schools. And without consulting that most underpaid and too-often scapegoated American professional, the public school teacher. A teacher I'll call Joe, 59, is just the kind of teacher that hard-core advocates of traditional masculinity might dream up as their ideal educator for young, white Christian boys and men — at least at first blush. Joe, who has been teaching for 36 years in total, and 33 years in the Minneapolis Public Schools, stands 6 foot, 5 inches tall. When it comes to physical education instruction, which he has led for 23 years at his current school building, Joe is no-nonsense and almost stern, cutting a strong, athletic and disciplined figure, a product of his Marine veteran father, who worked for decades in underground pipelines after leaving the military. Joe spends his winter days at an upper elementary school in a relatively affluent neighborhood of Minneapolis, with a student body that's more than 85% white; only to drive across the Mississippi River after school to St. Paul's Central High School, where he works as an assistant basketball coach at a school that is 59% POC students, including 29% Black students, in a neighborhood where 18% of residents live in poverty. It's a fitting dual existence for Joe, who describes his childhood as a life in two worlds. His dad was a member of the Red Cliff Native American tribe, and the family lived together on the reservation near Bayfield, Wisconsin, even though Joe's mother was white. He recalls that sometimes he was bullied on both ends, about his Indigenous ancestry by the white kids, and from the Native kids, called an 'apple,' suggesting that while he was 'red' on the outside, he was really 'white' on the inside. Joe thought maybe that was because his teacher mom encouraged her four boys to do well in school, something that wasn't always popular on the reservation, for myriad reasons. Teaching PE and coaching basketball enable Joe to use parts of his skill set and personality that some advocates of gender absolutism might consider contradictory. He retains much of the 'tough-love,' 'old-school' military mentality that his dad instilled in him. And at the same time, Joe also saw the ways in which that hard-core masculine identity led his dad to a life of physical pain and even premature death. Joe saw the strengths and limitations of a masculinity that's only rooted in hardness and discipline. So he brings a bit of his mom's more nurturing side to his role as an educator and coach as well. After all, Joe says the best parts of his day are often the hours he spends in physical education with a smaller group of students with disabilities and cognitive delays. These students, who are often withdrawn or quiet or uncooperative in public settings, seem to innately trust Joe, something I saw firsthand when I served as a substitute teacher in his classroom. They know the rhythms and routines of the gymnasium; it was a place they clearly felt accepted, loved, and known — something achieved by an educator rooted in discipline and athleticism but also in emotional connection, patience, and kindness. Given his popularity among many of his students and student athletes, and his continued commitment to athleticism even into his 59th year, you might think that Joe is supremely confident and undeterred in any school setting. But he knows that washboard abs or biceps would be no match for an AR-15 in a potential school shooting situation. 'That scares me more than anything as a teacher,' Joe told me, when we discussed the potential of a school shooter coming to our shared neighborhood. 'Even who I am, there is very little I can do to stop that situation. The best thing we can do is just barricade ourselves.' Joe says he thinks about it often, imagining himself in the shoes of fellow teachers and educators who have faced active shooters in their buildings. 'They probably thought the same things I do,' he said. 'Your senses are so heightened as a teacher. You're making sure all your doors are shut. You're following the proper procedures for code red. What do you do? What do I do? What if I'm at prep? What if it's happening in another area of the building? Of all the things, that's the one that scares me the most.' I'm struck at this moment by the seriousness and vulnerability and sadness that has come over Joe's face. This is a man who deeply loves being a teacher. By the nature of his work with disabled students — among whom boys are overrepresented — and his role as a boys' basketball coach, Joe does tend to spend a bit more time with boys as an educator and coach, though his office is also filled with cards from former students, divided equally between boys and girls. He's also the father of a 20-something son, whom he watched attend school in the same district where he teaches. He says the two of them will talk about those boys who seem to fall through the cracks, the ones for whom traditionally male-dominated outlets like sports or mathematics don't seem to fit, but who also don't find their place in outlets like music or drama. He and his son recently together discussed the fact that two of his classmates — despite their relatively privileged backgrounds — had recently died of drug overdoses. Joe talked also of watching the boys who used to run with joy and abandon around his gym classes, pelting each other with balls, turn into sullen, withdrawn, and angry teenagers. Sometimes seeing them makes him feel sad and powerless. 'When you, as a teacher, can pinpoint those students out, you try and let them figure out a way for themselves, and also serve as advocate for them and help them find a way,' Joe says. 'Sometimes they just need an ear to bend. Sometimes parents will ask me about younger kids and help them find a group, or a place to fit in.' I realize, in talking with Joe, that it's not his height or his athleticism or his perceived traditional masculinity that makes Joe a favorite among his students, or that has enabled him to have such longevity as a PE teacher in a challenging time for public school teachers, especially in inner-city, urban school districts. For Joe, for his students: the key is trust and relationship. He has been able to carve out a unique sense of both in his role as teacher and coach in Minneapolis. But it doesn't escape me that even in this ideal school, Joe still faces the fear and anxiety of the violence of the wider world, the ominous threat of a school shooting.
New York Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The End of the Blurb. Thank God.
Are you sitting down? In what the trade publication Publisher's Weekly reported as a 'stunning" or 'tour-de-force' development, the publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint has announced that it will no longer require authors to provide promotional blurbs for their books. If you're still standing and breathing normally, chances are you're not an author. Be grateful! All these years, you have been spared the indignity of going on bended knee, begging people — generally more eminent than yourself — to sprinkle holy water on your manuscript. If you are an author — a blurbee, as it were — you're probably uttering hosannas of thanks to S&S publisher Sean Manning for this benison. And if you're a blurber, that is, on the receiving end of requests for unction, your hosannas may even be more fervent. Asking for praise is an undignified business. It is inherently awkward, especially if the person you're asking is an acquaintance, friend, or worse yet, someone who sells more books than you do. (In my case, roughly 98 percent of the author-sphere.) I know this from experience. After six books and almost two decades of mendicancy, my knees had to be surgically unbent. They weren't the only damaged part of me. My self-esteem was so low, my self-loathing so high that I avoided mirrors. Dear Mr. Updike, I know you must hate getting letters like this, but I was wondering if you'd drop whatever you're doing and spend the next two days reading my new book. Eminent authors do, indeed, 'hate getting letters like this.' To make Mr. Updike's happiness complete, many such requests end with a sheepish PS: Sorry to ask, but would it be possible to let me have your praise by next Thursday? My publisher — who, by the way, is your No. 2 fan, next to me — says that's the latest he can hold the presses. After six books, I told my editor (who is now publisher, president and C.E.O. of S&S): 'No more blurbs for this camper.' He wasn't thrilled, but good man that he is, he acceded. We have gone on to do 14 more books together, all of them blurbless, leaving Mr. Updike and the other gods of Olympus in unmolested peace. On the higher slopes of Mount Olympus, blurbs are a way by which the gods speak to each other in code, with the whole world watching. One of the delights of the late, great Spy magazine was its feature, 'Logrolling in Our Time,' which mortified many reciprocal blurbers and blurbees. To pick just one … oh dear … 'Cheever continues to do what the best fiction has always done: give us back our humanity, enhanced.' (John Updike on John Cheever's 'Falconer.') 'Superb — the most important American novel I've read in years.' (Cheever on Updike's 'Rabbit Is Rich.") In 2000, Christopher Hitchens brought out a book garlanded with praise from Christopher's beau idéal, Gore Vidal. Its tone of hauteur perfectly matched Mr. Vidal's residence in Ravello, Italy, an aerie perched on a cliff high above the Tyrrhenian Sea: 'I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.' Their mutual admiration society came to grief following 9/11, which Vidal viewed as just deserts, and Christopher viewed rather differently. By this point, Vidal had become verbally incontinent, referring to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber as a 'noble boy.' Christopher denounced Vidal's 'crackpot strain' in the pages of Vanity Fair. This lèse-majesté resulted in defenestration from Ravello. He surrendered his Delfino coronet with typical panache. The back cover of his 2010 memoir, 'Hitch-22,' carries what might be the first instance of de-blurbing: 'I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.' This text ran with a giant 'X' across it. My father, William F. Buckley, Jr., was capable of similar sleight-of-hand in blurbmanship. He and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. were lifelong ideological opponents who frequently found themselves clashing on numerous public platforms. At one debate in the early Sixties, Schlesinger said in his opening remarks, 'Mr. Buckley has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.' Rather nice, but a low-hanging fruit. Dear old Dad couldn't resist. As he recounted in his book 'Cruising Speed': 'A year or so later, I scooped them [Schlesinger's kind words] up, and stuck them, unadorned, on the jacket of my new book, and waited for all hell to break loose; which it did, telephone calls, telegrams, threats of a lawsuit. I saw Arthur at a party the next year and told him that the deadline for the blurb for my next book was April 15, but that if he didn't have time to compose a fresh one, I'd use the old one, which was after all hard to improve upon.' Both these giants have left the building. If they were still with us, W.F.B. would doubtless be sending Mr. Schlesinger a link to the Publishers Weekly story, with a note saying that the exemption doesn't apply in their case, and that the deadline for a new blurb is next Thursday.
The Independent
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Why Simon & Schuster is getting rid of book blurbs
When you pick up a newly published book, you'll usually see a ringing endorsement from at least one familiar name on the front or back cover. These short reviews come from well-known authors, who hail the new book as 'brilliant', 'moving' or 'thought-provoking'. Often, they'll say they were 'unable to put it down' — or something similar. These endorsements — referred to as 'blurbs' in the business — are usually sourced prior to a book's publication. Authors, agents or editors will approach more famous peers to request a few words. Some lucky writers will get a second printing of their book, which will include favourable quotes from reviewers — but blurbs from other authors are seen as vital. However, the newly appointed publisher of Simon & Schuster 's US imprint, Sean Manning, is rejecting this long-standing tradition. In a piece in Publisher's Weekly, Manning says his authors will no longer be required to 'obtain blurbs for their books'. Manning argues that 'trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone's time'. He notes that a number of acclaimed titles in Simon & Schuster's back catalogue, including Catch-22 and All the President's Men, were first published without any blurbs at all. Furthermore, he notes that the convention of the blurb is unknown in other artistic industries. In publishing, the practice 'creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent'. Does Manning's decision herald a radical upheaval in the book world? Will his stance serve to liberate authors from the tyranny of the blurb? Words of genius In an essay for the Millions, Alan Levinovitz has considered the evolution of the blurb. Classical writers typically sought to connect their works to more famous figures through epigraphs and dedications. Levinovitz suggests that the practice of including praise for a text from a third party first emerged in the Renaissance. The famous humanist Sir Thomas More provides possibly the first recorded example of an author attempting to rustle up a favourable quote or two. In 1516, the year he published Utopia, More wrote to the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus requesting that the book 'be handsomely set off with the highest of recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and distinguished statesmen'. This practice became widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the rise of periodicals saw a boom in book reviews, which could be liberally quoted in prefaces. According to Levinovitz, the first example of an endorsement being added to the exterior of a book comes in 1856, with the publication of the second edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. A quote from a letter to Whitman from the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was gilt-printed at the base of its spine: I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career / R W Emerson. Emerson was apparently less than thrilled to discover he had unknowingly written the world's first cover blurb. More recently, Stephen King — himself an enthusiastic blurb writer — has cautioned against hyperbole. The protracted derision that followed Nicole Krauss's effusive blurb for David Grossman's novel To the End of the Land in 2010 ('David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity') might serve as a cautionary tale. Networks of affiliation While the practice of blurbing books can be viewed with scepticism, the importance of blurbs has gone largely unquestioned in publishing. Book sales tend to be driven by word of mouth, so it is often assumed the word of a popular writer will carry the most weight. But as Bill Morris notes, a blurb from a particular author might just as easily turn a reader off a book. Tastes are subjective and authors only have sway over readers within defined areas of interest. Michael Maguire's 2018 study revealed that blurb writing exchanges occur through close networks of affiliation around genres, publishers, geographical locations, and institutions such as universities. Maguire's mapping of the blurb economy supports Manning's belief that book blurbs tend to emerge from a culture of favouritism and mutual backscratching, but it also shows that influential authors are, on balance, generous in their support for novices in their fields. While several writers have questioned the necessity of blurbs, booksellers do apparently find them useful for positioning new titles. A quote from an established author can help booksellers promote and recommend works to readers. The famous names who can provide meaningful endorsements are few and highly coveted. Several authors have reported that the sheer volume of requests for blurbs they receive is unsustainable. Many write them out a sense of obligation, rather than because they are genuinely enthused. Manning's new policy alleviates some of these pressures. New authors will not have to go through the often humiliating process of seeking endorsement; successful writers won't be as exhausted by requests. Personal and professional networks will not be so overtaxed, potentially allowing space for other forms of mutual support. As Manning notes, reducing the dependence on blurbs may encourage innovation in book promotion. The importance of blurbs has long been accepted wisdom in publishing, but the assumption is worth challenging. As Catriona Menzies-Pike observes, if all books are blurbed as a matter of course then it is impossible to gauge their real value. Manning's initiative may create the space to consider whether this often fraught and questionable practice is really necessary.
