The Oxonian Review is pleased to present this week’s “Weekly Round-up”, featuring a selection of recent links to websites and articles which the OR editorial staff have found interesting, illuminating, or otherwise noteworthy. Enjoy!

1. “Going for a Beer”, The New Yorker: “Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Can’t remember.”

2. “Their states and ours: the BFI wins again”, Sea Songs: “Just as the 1959 Report on Modernisation, an extraordinary, quasi-fetishistic [British Transport Films] hymn to working with fire and steel resembles a more benign, Macmillanite version of Soviet propaganda of that time, so does a 1983 East German film on the country’s housing development resemble in some ways the official products of Britain in the declining years of Butskellism.”

3. “Blake Butler and What Happens When a Novelist Lives on the Internet”, The New York Observer: “The book’s structure recalls the stacking of information and ephemera of a Web site… Characters have no names nor are they developed in any conventional sense of facing a problem, overcoming that problem or failing to, and then coming out changed for better or worse. There Is No Year is a rickety sculpture of images piled atop one another…”

4. “The Linguistic Narcissism of Christopher Hitchens”, Language Log: “Mr. Hitchens wants to outlaw a sense of brutalize and its derivatives that’s been around since the late 19th century…[F]or him to conclude that the rest of the world’s usage is therefore an ‘error’ is a lovely example of linguistic narcissism.”

5. “The Wonderfulness of Us”, London Review of Books: “[British Secretary of State for Education, Michael] Gove’s vision of ‘our island story’ is about examining the ‘struggles of the past’ to see how they brought about ‘the liberties of the present’…The demand, really, is for a celebratory history: how otherwise could it serve as the cement of national identity?.”