Brian Chasnoff

I’m too distracted to read this New York Times story on how technology has short-circuited my brain.

Would someone please read it and distill the main points into a short blog post so I can move on with my harried life?

Here’s an interesting After Deadline post: The New York Times has compiled a list of the 50 words that most often confuse readers of the venerable newspaper.

(Side note: I had no idea you could double click on any word in a Times story and then click on the question mark to get an American Heritage dictionary definition. Cool.)

Personally, I’m a bit obsessive about strange words that appear in books or articles. Ornate and alien, they hover above the page and dare me to drop everything to look them up. I once bought a 2,230 page Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary that contains more than 315,00 entries so as never to be left linguistically limp. Now I just use the wonderful Dictionary.com app.

There’s often healthy debate about whether it befits a writer to bedevil his readers with a baroque vocabulary. I’m enough of a word nerd to believe that with relevance and restraint, a well-placed gem can elevate the atmosphere of any story. One example is Jeffry Tayler’s “This Side of Ultima Thule,” a bleak, engrossing account of his journey into Siberia, which he calls a “boreal hell.” (Maybe you knew that “boreal” means “of or pertaining the north,” but I didn’t until I looked it up.)

A New Yorker article on the troubling case of Cameron Todd Willingham.

A New York Times piece on the lost book of Carl Jung.