By William Germano. For bookish types, the equivalent of 42.195 kilometers is the reading marathon. Instead of running, you sit and listen and cheer the readers on and maybe struggle to stay alert and upright.
The complete Ulysses, every pentameter line of Paradise Lost, each word of that big book about a whale. There have been marathon readings of Catch-22 and Civilization and Its Discontents, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and even Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.  
Many a Christmas season has seen so-called marathon readings of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (though we might properly think of that one as a 5K reading).
The reading marathon is a brainy endurance test. It’s become part of our public literary culture. But the game has taken a new turn.
This year Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 2015 Venice Biennale, announced a marathon reading of Marx’s three-volume Das Kapital.
Enwezor likened the ritualized performance of Marx to the practice in the Sikh religious tradition of a continuous reading of sacred text. He might have also invoked many other rituals and performances of continuous reading. For example, the Jewish tradition engages a series of texts across the year, to be repeated when the year turns. More...

By Allan Metcalf. We want our language to be free of bias, don’t we? Surely anyone of good will would want to be polite to others rather than unintentionally insulting them. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What, then, is the opposite of hate? The answer, it seems to me, changes when we accuse the person rather than the hate or the hating. In today’s parlance, a hater is not simply someone who hates — or rather, the variety of hate has become narrower and more specific. In politics, there are Hillary haters. Tom Brady recently called an ESPN commentator a “Patriot hater.” Anyone who writes in a forum, like this one, that invites comments is advised to ignore the haters. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. According to “steveknows,” commenting on the Slate article “Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!” I have been punked. I don’t care. Gertrude Stein said there was nothing more exciting than diagramming sentences, and she wasn’t all that far from the truth. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. The many recent allegations of sexual crimes against children by famous figures in entertainment and politics have led to extensive discussions in the British press concerning what they refer to as pedophilia (or paedophilia in the usual British spelling). What a strange word. The Greek element -phil- is called a combining form in English grammar: not usable alone, and neither a suffix nor a prefix, but used in building English words. More...

By Ben Yagoda. August 8 was a momentous day, at least in my geeky world. That was because The New York Times decided “bullshit” was Fit To Print. Twice before in its 164-year history (in 1977 and 2007), the paper quoted someone as saying the word, and it has appeared on the paper’s website, but its first straight-up print appearance, with no quotation marks, was in this sentence from Neil Genzlinger’s articleabout Jon Stewart’s final broadcast: “He delivered a monologue on the theme of bullshit, a word he used over and over in the span of a few minutes.” More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Capecitabine (C₁₅H₂₂FN₃O₆) is an oncologically important chemotherapeutic prodrug. It has a trade name: Xeloda (pronounced zee-ló-da, I presume). And it’s just as well, because capecitabine is a train wreck of a name. The normal principles for interpreting English orthography come nowhere near determining even an approximate pronunciation. Try saying capecitabine aloud before you read on. More...

By Ben Yagoda. The catcher and sage Yogi Berra was allegedly once asked if the name of the bottled chocolate beverage he endorsed was hyphenated. “No ma’am,” he is said to have replied. “It’s not even carbonated.” More...

By Amitava Kumar. The use of the word prompt to mean incitement or cue has probably been around for 500 years or so, but its use in a narrower sense, as an instruction or directions for a writing assignment in class, is new to me. More...