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The last time I tried to “teach” Madame Bovary was in an advanced undergraduate course at a London university, and I had expected better results. The students either hated it, or found it “boring,” and even when they did “sort of like” it, they hated the central character, and said things like: “How can I like someone who cheats on their husband?” Or “That woman had everything and she was never happy.” They found Emma complete...

Satirical dictionaries by Gustave Flaubert and Ambrose Bierce show how words can become detached from their meanings.

In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), a lost tourist complains that the maps are much better in his homeland. So advance

“Despite all the hand-wringing about distraction, it’s asked less often what it is that what we want to attend to in the first place.”