This week on the bookish internet

• 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)