Rosina Lippi-Green is the author of English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. Now she has set up a companion website for the book, with observations on everything from Ebonics to double negatives.

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber..." So begins the winner of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which competitors write incredibly bad opening sentences to incredibly bad novels. Read the full results here.

Hanzi Smatter is a blog "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture." Find out what that tattoo really says.

On Wired Science, Brandom Keim has coined a new word: astrobioethics, "a branch of ethics involving the implications of life science in space." He's hoping his neologism will make it into the dictionaries some day.

Are online readers "selfish, lazy, and ruthless"? That's the theory of Web guru Jakob Nielsen. Slate's Michael Agger investigates.

Merlin Mann of the productivity blog "43 Folders" has five great tips for beating writer's block. Read them here.

It's one of the most famous quotations in modern history. But who first wrote it? In the Yale Alumni Magazine, Fred Shapiro presents new historical evidence and sparks a debate that is far from serene.