It’s easy to get angry and vengeful about the Bibas family, the mother and two children who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 and whose bodies were returned by returned by Hamas some 500 days later. The body said to be the mother turned out to be that of some unknown woman; the bodies of the two children showed they had been killed by hand and then mutilated to simulate death by an airstrike. Worse things happened to mothers and children on Oct. 7, but if we ever needed a reminder that Hamas and its supporters are psychopaths, it’s difficult to ignore the evidence now. Read Matti Friedman’s “The Family That Never Came Home” at the Free Press and Seth Mandel’s “The Meaning of Kfir Bibas.”
My 1970 AP Stylebook
For those of us who attended journalism school before the 2000s (long before), the “class bible” was the Associated Press Stylebook. We were required to memorize it in our first introductory journalism course; a style error on an assignment was an automatic F. (We could also keep it with us during assignments and tests.) I still have my copy, a small paperback pamphlet about one fourth of an inch thick. But over the years, AP made changes. The first one I really noticed was that pro-life groups could no longer be referred to as that but instead had to be called “anti-abortion groups.” The pace of change quickened after that. The subject of the Style Book has come up oddly enough because of the spat President Trump is having with AP over the “Gulf of America.” Marc Caputo at Axios notes that the spat is about far more than what to call the Gulf, because the Stylebook has become far more than news writing style.
Some 20 years ago, I had a project “forwarded for handling” (aka “dumped in my lap”) by the assistant to the company’s CEO – several letters from a middle school English class in San Francisco. A cover letter by the teacher explained this was a class assignment to protest something they believed the company was doing, and she was proudly joining their protest. It was my second direct experience with learning something had happened to the teaching of English; the first had occurred some years earlier when my oldest son was in sixth grade, and I discovered his English teacher couldn’t spell. The San Francisco letters, including the teacher’s, were filled with spelling errors, dangling participles, grammatical mistakes, and incomplete sentences. The response sent back was thanking her and the class for their concern, pointing out the company wasn’t doing what they thought. We included a red-marked correction of the teacher’s letter. I wish I had had Liza Libes’ post entitled “Why Did English Departments Abandon Ideas for Ideology?”
More Good Reads
Faith
American Revival: A nation with the soul of many churches – Spencer Klavan at The New Jerusalem. His dad responds: Salvation the American Way by Andrew Klavan.
An irreducible minimum – Andrew Roycroft at The Sounding Board.
News Media
How the U.S. Government Controls the Ukrainian Media – Tanya Lukyanova at The Free Press.
Art
How the St. Louis Art Museum accumulated a world-class German art collection – SLAM Blog.
A glimpse at Picasso and Pollock masterpieces kept in Tehran vault – Armen Nersessian at BBC.
Could this Van Gogh come from Nazi Germany? – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.
Writing and Literature
5 Reasons to Write in Your Books – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Farewell, Peak Literacy, We Hardly Knew You – Brian Miller at The Wood Between the Worlds.
Life and Culture
Against the Vandals – Bari Weiss speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
Vance’s truth bombs – James Price at The Critic Magazine.
Student Recounts Five Days of Flame – Avedis Maljanian at Hillsdale Collegian.
The museum’s lost craft – Lola Salem at The Critic Magazine.
American Stuff
A Short History of the Electoral College – Miguel Faria at Real Clear History.
British Stuff
The Royal Society should not expel Elon – Freddie Attenborough at The Critic Magazine.
Poetry
“I would I might forget that I am I,” poem by George Santayana – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The Lantern Out of Doors” – Andy Patton at Rhyme & Reason, a Rabbit Room podcast.
The Last Goodbye – Billy Boyd (from The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies)
Painting: Reading Lady, oil on canvas by Caspar Ritter (1861-1923).
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