“In the United States, a bidialectal person might be someone who speaks both Standard American English and African-American Vernacular English (called AAVE but also known as ‘Ebonics’), which differ a lot in pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary – so much so that AAVE has controversially been called a distinct language. So do bidialectals enjoy the same cognitive benefits as bilinguals?”

“E-book sales have fallen precipitously for months, in part because many publishers have raised their prices after negotiating with Amazon and gaining the ability to set their own prices.”

“A writer has the right to inhabit any character she pleases — she’s always had it and will continue to have it. The complaint seems to be less that some people ask writers to think about cultural appropriation, and more that a writer wishes her work not to be critiqued for doing so, that instead she get a gold star for trying.”

“I am locked in a battle between self-doubt and self-discipline, and the former usually wins. I have the concentration of… oh, I like your shoes. It is so much easier to plummet down the sinkhole of Twitter.”

Yaa Gyasi: “This novel was an attempt for me to say: We cannot look away when something like this is happening. We can’t look away. We don’t get to.”

“Shakespeare refuses to be boxed in. Not only do we know very little about what he really thought, felt and believed, but the plays themselves are elusive. Just when you think you’ve got a meaning nailed down, your interpretation melts like jelly and you’re left scratching your head. Maybe he’s deep, very deep. Or maybe he didn’t have a continuity editor. And Shakespeare will never turn up on a talkshow and be asked to explain himself, the lucky devil.”

“Punctuation started out as free and easy prosodic units, meant to help the reader read out loud to an audience with all the requisite intonation, tone, pitch and pauses intended by an absent author. … With the more speech-like IM, texts, tweets, punctuation is just getting back to its roots, as a way to convey prosodic and speech cues in the absence of sound and vision.”

“Wikipedia editors sometimes use bots to help them keep on top of changes that users have made to the online encyclopedia. But when two editors task different bots with making incompatible edits, each bot will keep finding that its work has been undone.”

“Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible.” That day has arrived.

“No one could get into philosophical argument with Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and walk away unchanged. Born in 1623, Cavendish was an outspoken aristocrat who traveled in circles of scientific thinkers, and broke ground on proto-feminism, natural philosophy (the 17th century term for science), and social politics. In her lifetime, she published 20 books. But amid her poetry and essays, she also published one of the earliest examples of science fiction. In 1666. She named it The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World.”

The author of Truman, John Adams, and 1776 has received two Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The new $25,000 prize “will be given to those who contribute to the public’s understanding of the Revolution.”

“There are no HBCU novels. Our first-generation Mexican American freshman opuses are far and few between. Don Lee’s The Collective takes a stab at shaking the framework, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao rattles the genre’s predilections as well, but the campus novel could just as soon be called The Adventures of Eccentric White Kids. For a genre built on the notion of change, it’s lacking an awful lot of it.”

“These new literary protagonists are bright spots in a Hollywood landscape where representation of women has been pretty bleak. Female leads, when they make it on-screen at all (less than 30 percent of the time), run a high risk of being over-sexualized, one-dimensional, and/or formulaic.”

“All have remained out of sight for almost 80 years; tucked away in library archives and private collections. But apart from the title story, I’d Die for You, the contents remain a secret.”

“The company is essentially a book publisher, but instead of releasing whole novels by lone authors, it rolls out stories like a TV network: one “episode” a week, each penned by a different writer. Every installment, much like every episode of The Night Of, will take a little under an hour of your time, and for those who keep up with their shows on iTunes, the options to buy will be familiar.”

“This is a cultural moment that is newly respectful of the individual experience, of the individual voice, of the individual truth. It is a moment that is grappling, belatedly, with the many flaws of mass media and monoculture; it is a moment that is respecting, finally, how varied people’s sense of the world can be. All of that involves, intimately, the words people choose to share that world with each other. In that landscape of fast-moving language, one person’s slur is another’s term of endearment. The regulatory body with the most authority to determine what will offend you is, in the end, you.”

“[Toronto’s] roughly 2.8 million residents come from about 200 distinct ethnic origins and speak more than 140 languages and dialects. Of these, [linguist Anastasia] Riehl says, at least a ‘few dozen’ are endangered and several probably don’t even have proper names. “Large multi-ethnic cities like Toronto become the last context for these languages.'”

“[Editorial staffers and the new owners at Univision] fought over the decision to delete six posts from the embattled digital media company’s stable of sites … Also expected to be discussed at the meeting was staffers’ request that Univision indemnify them personally for stories published – a request that the media giant denied, sources said.”

“Not since Max Perkins worked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald has there been a more admired editor than Robert Gottlieb. His has been, he would admit, a privileged and enviable life, which is really just another way of saying that it has been a life filled with books.”

“Arrival, the forthcoming sci-fi drama, is that rare bird: a Hollywood film featuring a linguist as the main character.” With that as a (quite relevant, as it turns out) jumping-off point, linguist Chi Luu argues that writing is far more separate from speech than most of us realize – and that the linguistic problem at the heart of this new movie (yes, there are spoilers) is just a logical extension of that difference.

“The current MFA studio model grafts an MFA program onto an existing English department without a studied consideration of what the degree could be. This is not surprising, since the MFA did not emerge naturally out of an English department curriculum.”

“Here’s my semi-shameful secret: I like reader reviews. I often make a point of seeking them out. When reporters used to interview me on the subject, I’d feel obliged to note that you can find reviews on Amazon and (even more commonly) on Goodreads that are as considered, thorough, and well-written as anything that used to appear in your local newspaper. But actually I don’t care much about those reviews. I already know how people like me, people who read books professionally and with a particular set of aesthetic values, respond to a text. I go to reader reviews to see how the other half reads.”

“His universal grammar was put forward as an innate component of the human mind—and it promised to reveal the deep biological underpinnings of the world’s 6,000-plus human languages. The most powerful, not to mention the most beautiful, theories in science reveal hidden unity underneath surface diversity, and so this theory held immediate appeal. But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years.”

“It started with 176 icons. Now it’s grown to 1,800. But who decides what becomes an emoji? We lift the lid on the California coders who live and breathe smiling cats and banned aubergines.” (Note to Americans: aubergine is British for eggplant.)

“Though this year’s short list is not nearly as internationally diverse as last year’s — nominees hail only from the U.S., U.K., and Canada — there’s a significant chance a person of color could follow in the footsteps of last year’s winner, Marlon James, and take home the prize.”

“The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s. But a new study yields a startling conclusion: The codex is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America.”