Thu-Huong Ha

This story contains spoilers to the book and TV adaptation for The Handmaid’s Tale.

Robert M. Pirsig, author of the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has died. He was 88.

In spoken English, the difference between a genuine “Can’t wait” and a sarcastic “Can’t wait” is obvious. Online and in written form, not so much.

So you want to visit the US. You’ve packed your bags, gotten your documents together, maybe paid for a pricey tourist visa, to visit the sprawling land of barbecue and purple mountains. Now for the mental preparation: How to handle etiquette, bribery, and conversations about controversial US president Donald Trump when visiting the United States.

Packed into the dense legalese of a will are great emotional power and the potential for profound confusion: Not only does your will represent all that materially remains of your life, its trying task is to clarify the difference between what friends and family think they deserve from that life in return for their loyalty, and what you think they deserve.

A book with no content is a hit with US Republicans and president Donald Trump.

If Barack Obama reads like a college professor and Donald Trump reads like a pundit, Justin Trudeau reads like your teenage nephew.

Wall Street’s new “Fearless Girl” is getting her first lesson in manspreading.

Soon the world will have a massive physical monument to censorship.

On Sunday evening, a man was violently removed from his seat on a United flight from Chicago, Illinois to Louisville, Kentucky. Passengers from the flight shared video of the violent ousting by Chicago police. The story has circulated widely, and the United’s stock plunged as the public’s outrage grew.

Censorship is on the rise in the US, suspects James LaRue, director of the US Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF).

In a national culture newly aware of micro-aggressions and offensive speech, what you say can easily strike the wrong tone. One increasingly common solution among US book publishers: Hire someone to be offended for you. “Sensitivity readers,” starting at a small fee of $250 a manuscript, read unpublished works and ask, ”Would my community find this disrespectful? Does this sound authentic?”

In the world of grammar sticklery, there’s no rest for the weary.

“I probably started reading ultra hardcore about seven or eight years ago,” says Tom Bilyeu, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. “Ultra hardcore” means that Bilyeu reads everywhere: While he brushes his teeth, while he gets dressed, in the 30 seconds it takes to cross rooms in his house, he’s reading.

It’s an historic day for Britain as it formally bids adieu to the European Union.

Americans are swapping bookstores.

The dark, fantastical Underground Railroad is on its way to TV.

US copyright laws are severely outdated, and it looks like lawmakers are finally taking action. Yesterday, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that proposes to change the country’s head of copyright from someone appointed by the Library of Congress, to someone picked by the president.

Last week, hundreds of thousands of people around the US were reading and sharing a story about punctuation.

Are books getting dumber? Does good writing really use fewer -ly adverbs? Is there really such a thing as “how women write”?

The people have spoken, and they can has cheezburger.

Through fiction, British boarding schools and American gym classes have been exported around the world. But what about stories from rural Poland, or the Norwegian coast, or Chinese mega-cities? For readers interested in books from beyond the English language, the prestigious Man Booker International Prize has some recommendations.

A Maine court ruling in a case about overtime pay and dairy delivery didn’t come down to trucks, milk, or money. Instead, it hinged on one missing comma.

Nearly 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story mocking what we now might call “fake news.” The story, never published, remained in the archives until today.