July 2019: Because Internet is published and makes the NYT Bestseller list!

There was a New York Times Daily review of Because Internet (paper version!). Here’s one of the very nice things that reviewer Jennifer Szalai had to say about it:

McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.

There was also SO MUCH other media about the book, including reviews in Time, the Economist, The New Yorker, and more; excerpts or interviews in Wired, Slate, Vox, Salon, Vice, and more; and interviews on NPR All Things Considered and Science Friday, Slate’s Lexicon Valley, Grammar Girl, The Allusionist and the Cracked Podcast, just to pick a few. (Full list with hyperlinks below.) A great little ad also ran next to the NYT crossword puzzle in the print edition (photo).

As if that weren’t enough, Because Internet also hit the New York Times bestseller list at #9 in its first week! Huge, huge thanks to everyone who preordered it and bought it during the first week which made this happen.

I did a book launch party in Montreal with Argo Bookshop at the Atwater Library! I was especially excited about the cake with the cover of my book on it which allowed me to literally eat my words and the internet-themed youtube playlist that twitter helped us put together to project on a screen during the party. Many thanks to all the people who attended!

I did a collaboration with youtuber Tom Scott! The first video in this new round of Language Files videos is “why typing like this is sometimes okay.” and is directly based on Chapter 4 of Because Internet! Stay tuned for more Language Files videos with Tom and our new collaborator Molly Ruhl in future months.

Everything is also coming up Because Internet on Lingthusiasm! Our main episode was about the connections between gesture and emoji, aka the behind the scenes story of the part of the book where my podcast cohost Lauren Gawne makes a cameo! The bonus episode was about familects, not the book, but we also released a Special Offer on Patreon to get signed bookplate stickers. Our academic paper about emoji as digital gesture in the journal Language@Internet also came out this month, and Lauren wrote an accessible summary version of it for The Conversation which got picked up by Quartz. (We were very pleased to have to disclose that our Lingthusiasm patrons helped fund this research.) Also, I now have an Erdős number.

When people ask what it’s like to have this book I’ve been working on for five years finally come out, the best analogy that I can think of is that it’s like having it constantly be my birthday for the past several weeks: I’ve been hearing from so many people from all corners of my life who are excited to have spotted BECAUSE INTERNET in their local bookstore or library, or to have heard me on the radio or their favourite podcast. I haven’t always been able to reply to everyone individually, but I truly appreciate how many communities have claimed this book’s success as their own.

In non-book-related news, I also went to California to do a linguistics outreach event at the LSA Summer Institute in UC Davis, consisting of a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon focussing on articles about underrepresented languages in the afternoon, and in the evening doing a talk about effective communication of linguistics to a general audience and MCing the 3 Minute Thesis event. (A thread from an interesting talk I attended on language tech.)

Here is the truly staggering media list just for July alone for Because Internet, all 65 (!) items:

National Radio

• NPR “Science Friday” – interview –7/26
• NPR “All Things Considered” – interview – 7/31

National Print/Top Online

• The National Book Review– roundup “5 Hot Books”  –7/3
• The Turnaround Blog – roundup “2019 Summer Reads”– 7/16
• The Baffler– review –7/17
• Visual Thesaurus – review – 7/17
• Publisher’s Weekly –PW Books of the Week- 7/19
• The Economist– review – 7/19
• Time Magazine– review – 7/29
• The New Yorker– review– 7/26
• New York Times– daily review – 7/22
• The New Yorker – emoji feature – 7/22
• Mr. Porter – review – 7/23
• Wired – excerpt – 7/23
• Vice – interview – 7/23
• Babble– review – 7/23
• Tumblr – roundup “New Release Tuesday” – 7/23
• Slate – excerpt – 7/24
• Salon – interview – 7/23
• BoingBoing – review – 7/24
• New Scientist– excerpt – 7/24
• Hypebae– roundup “10 Books to Add to Your Vacation Reading List This Summer”  –7/24
• Medium’s One Zero – feature “What’s on Your Home Screen” – 7/25
• Vox– interview – 7/29
• Toronto Star – excerpt – 7/28

Newsletters:

• Dense Discovery Newsletter– mention – 7/15
• Nicole Cliffe’s “Nicole Knows” – newsletter mention – 7/23
• BuzzFeed News “Quibbles & Bits Newsletter” – interview – 7/25
• Two Bossy Dames Newsletter – guest host – 7/26
• LinkedIn/Arianna Huffington’s Newsletter– Book of the Week – 7/29
• New York Times “What to Cook” Newsletter– mention – 7/29
• New York Times “Daily Briefing” Newsletter – mention – 8/1
• Six Pixels of Separation “Six Links” Newsletter – mention – 8/3
• Recs Weekly from Rex Sorgatz Newsletter– mention – 8/4
• Class Participation Newsletter– mention – 8/6

Podcasts:

• The Cracked Podcast – interview –7/8
• PRX/The Allusionist Podcast – interview –7/13
• Emojipedia’s “Emoji Wrap” Podcast– interview –7/16
• Economist’s “The Intelligence” Podcast– review –7/18
• Talk the Talk Podcast– interview –7/21
• Bookriot’s “The Bookriot Podcast”– interview – 7/22
• Grammar Girl Podcast– interview –7/23
• Slate’s “Lexicon Valley” Podcast – interview –7/23
• American Scholar “Smarty Pants” podcast – interview – 7/26
• The Language Mastery Show – interview –7/26

Local Print/Online/Radio:

• New York Post – feature– 7/13
• Fox2Now/St. Louis– feature– 7/15
• CJAD Montreal – 7/20
• NewsTalk 610 CKTB (Niagara) – 7/21
• US National Radio Satellite Tour (14 local radio stations in one morning!) – 7/24
• Daybreak Montreal and Quebec AM – 7/29

Selected tweets:

• In this house we appreciate typographical tone of voice and the signs as topics in my book about internet linguistics
• Me, a linguist travelling: trying to pronounce landmarks the way the locals do
• Because Internet as other objects that are also yellow and light blue: a thread
• A thread about what I’ve learned about autographs and signing pens
• Internet linguistics miscommunication discussion thread
• Poll: what does :P mean to you
• From inside the CBC Montreal studio recording remote interviews, aka my second office this month and from inside the NBC studio with a fancy camera
• A thread on how to preorder a book from your local indie bookstore
• A very meta thread on how to promote your book on social media without being annoying
• Please join me in my belatedly-learning-that-multiword-modifiers-functioning-syntactically-as-a-single-word-is-a-Canadianism amazement
• Photos of the first finished copy of Because Internet
• You, waiting for your pre-ordered copy of BECAUSE INTERNET: böök?
• can i scrooge mcduck the copies of my book
• my new favourite example of typographical tone of voice, brought to you by the Good Omens fandom
• my study of whether people pronounce the first “t” in internet
• forgive me / i had to analyze it
• re-reading the book I literally wrote
• A tour through the index of Because Internet

Selected blog posts:

• New publication: Emoji as Digital Gestures in Language@Internet [Open Access]
• Because Internet, who lives on tumblr as allthingslinguistic & is an entire book about internet linguistics coming out on July 23 2019, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
• Bad emoji reporting, redux
• Scots language on twitter
• Why parrots can talk like humans
• Because Internet featured on the official tumblr books blog
• a classic tumblr post in Because Internet
• An AI Weirdness book, which I am very excited for

This month’s photo is real paper proof that Because Internet made the New York Times Bestseller list!