- Why doesn’t English have an Academy, like other European languages? Dylan Byron investigates the historical accidents that kept English from being regulated into submission. (Lapham’s Quarterly)
- This one is more than a week old, but it got buried in my Instapaper folders. Oopsie.
- Alan Jacobs looks to Roman writer Horace and the past in search of tranquility. (LitHub)
- Neil McRobert shows us how recent fiction is upending the “final girl” trope. (Slate)
- Rachel del Valle writes in praise of looking words up in dictionaries. (New York Times)
- Chelsea T. Hicks writes in praise of N. Scott Momaday. (The Paris Review)
- More praise! Yiyun Li writes in praise of War and Peace. (The Paris Review)
- Veronica Esposito looks for the reasons why reading gives us chills and lights up our emotions. (LitHub)
- And, for funsies: Leslie Ylinen and Alice LaHoda imagine what NextDoor might be like if Hercule Poirot lived in your neighborhood. (McSweeney’s)
A Bookish Type 