| Dropping Names Last November, the American Ornithological Society, or AOS, announced that it would change the common names of all American birds named after people. There are 152 such “eponymic” names (that is, birds that are named after a specific person, like Bicknell's Thrush) on the AOS' official checklist, and the group is planning to start with between 70 and 80 species predominantly found in the U.S. and Canada. In the coming years, birds like Cooper's Hawk, Wilson's Snipe, and Lincoln's Sparrow will be stripped of their eponyms and given new common English names. The eponymic naming issue has been heating up in the bird world for a few years now. Birds got their English names when they were “discovered” by Western scientists, or otherwise identified as a new species. Check out these titles |
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| Books on the Air An overview of talked-about books and authors. This weekly update, published every Friday, provides descriptions of recent TV and radio appearances by authors and their recently released books. See the hot titles from the media this week. |
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| Katherine Arden Born in Texas, Katherine studied French and Russian at Middlebury College. She has lived abroad in France and in Moscow, among other places. She has also lived in Hawaii, where she wrote much of The Bear and the Nightingale. She currently lives in Vermont with her husband and her dog, where she grows a gigantic garden, hikes and skis. Check out her books here |
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| Literary Mean Girls Mean girls make everything better, at least when it comes to storytelling. Without them, there'd be no conflict, no plot, no grit. Here are some of the best books about “mean girls,” from classics to modern tales, fiction and non. Check them out here |
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| Writing is like traveling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.-Langston Hughes
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