Good bad review II

Speaking of good bad reviews, here's an excellent one by James Fallows.

How to write a bad review

J. Robert Lennon provides good advice in Salon on how to write a good bad review,   occasioned by William Giraldi's truly bad bad review of a couple of Alix Ohlin's books in last Sunday's NYT Book Review. It's hard to imagine anyone reading Giraldi's review and not thinking "sheesh, what an asshole!" - and also hard to imagine that Giraldi is a colleague (at Agni) of the gentlemanly Sven Birkerts, who is both a victim and critic of just this kind of puerile, mean-spirited, show-offy snark.

Urban Neighborhood Institution

The UNI mobile library comes to Almaty and another marriage gets off to a good start, with good books and a good roof over their heads.

"There is trouble in the gypsy village"

Go to Better than English for your daily dose of untranslateable words and phrases. Not sure how accurate these definitions are (the entry on Norwegian "forelskelse" is all wrong), but plenty of comic relief.

See also Quotidian and Wordnik, if you like this kind of thing, and Howard Rheingold's book "They have a word for it"