Maud Newton's right about two things in her essay "Another Thing To Sort Of Pin On David Foster Wallace": Qualifiers have snuck into our written language recently, and the Internet has a lot to do with it. But I disagree with her diagnosis of this type of language as "soothing." -- I personally find it interruptive at first until I get the hang of the rhythm of it. If anything I strive to eliminate those qualifiers from speaking and let them slide when I'm writing, say, a blog post. (Also to consider: Have qualifiers truly -- ha! -- been sneaking into the written work as a whole, or is it largely confined to online writing? Just because it's more common in this medium doesn't say anything about the medium as a whole. Given how much of, say, INFINITE JEST is from the perspective of one teenager or another, that's a more accurate picture of how they talk and put word pictures together. There are far fewer qualifiers in a work like EVERYTHING AND MORE.) Ultimately, the argument takes a turn into "There is the correct way to write, and then there are the other ways."

Are you a Dwight, a Janet or a Michiko?

Concurrent with its 100 notable books of 2010 (which will take me a few days to digest) the New York Times has published the top-10 lists of three of its lead critics, Dwight Garner, Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani. Here's where I would rig up some kind of clever personality quiz taking your favorite color and the last magazine you read into consideration... I was surprised to determine that despite disagreeing with some items on her list, I'm definitely a Michiko.

Times in 2011: Pay Up!

Not book-specific, but since I link to them constantly, the New York Times announced this week that it will begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011, giving visitors a limited number of articles to read for free before locking up. Of course we all remember the Times instituted a paywall for some of its content under the name "TimesSelect" a few years ago and that was widely regarded as a failure, but maybe it didn't fail big enough?

I think it's a bad idea but I would probably pay, not so much for news as that for features and reporting, I have not found anything close. Obviously I read the headlines every morning and have since before I moved here, but that's not all of it. The Times can make me care about laundromat regulars in Brooklyn and an orchestra strike in Cleveland and what kinds of dogs are bad for running with and the origins of the term "guido" and... you get the picture. Even when I'm making fun of the Paper of Record, it's still Of Record.

I guess the folks in charge are banking on the fact that people like me will grudgingly fork over when the time comes. And then there's the question of how much the decision makers at the Times believe access to be worth, versus how much consumers are willing to pay. I don't pay for any other subscription sites like Salon, so that's a leap for me. (Hulu is going through this process as well, and it's difficult to say which will occasion the greater hue and cry when it starts collecting. Just kidding, it's totally going to be Hulu. Chris Anderson would say, Free wants to stay home from work and watch "High School High" and "Beverly Hills Cop III," proving that Free has bad taste in junk film.)

At the same time, if I'm behind the pay wall and you're not, how can we have a conversation about the content of the paper? If I send you an article and you've exceeded your quota, do I have to settle for describing the article to you. Or do I screencap it and send it to you anyway... ahem. As one could potentially do. That's where I think this decision verges on the illogical -- we're not making enough online ad revenue off our stories, so the solution is to ensure even fewer readers see them? But I'm not privy to their financials so maybe this works on paper. (No pun intended.)

Would you consider paying to read the Times if you don't already?