Those wacky British muggles are at it again! More words for the Oxford Dictionary of English! They say they add words that “well-known and have proven they can pass the test of time”. Don’t be a cyberslacker, surf on over here to see the story. It’s bootylicious.
Ok, maybe not literature (not even close, really) but I’m currently reading a couple of interesting books. Scott Ritter’s Frontier Justice in which he holds back no punches on the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq, and USC professor Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, a look at the genesis of American violence. Both very interesting.
Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) is in Edinburgh promoting her new book, Global Woman, in which she argues that those “who hire cleaners and nannies so women are free to go out to work are contributing towards a new exploitative ‘servant economy’ which is destroying families in the developing world.” The main blame, she says, lies with men who fail to share the burdens of the home. The article is too short to allow her to make a convincing argument, I think.
Doris Lessing calls Tony Blair a “rabbit” and reminisces about a meeting with Henry Kissinger during which he talked about a “kitten bomb.”
is here. Sample item: “General Richard Sanchez said that he was scaling back aggressive roundups of Iraqis in the search for Saddam Hussein and Baath Party loyalists because he was afraid that “maybe our iron-fisted approach to the conduct of ops was beginning to alienate Iraqis. I started to get those sensings from multiple sources.” Someone give this man a prize.
Orhan Pamuk writes about Istanbul for the BBC’s Sense of the City series.