La Stampa, a nationally- and regionally-focused outlet headquartered in Turin, is opening La Stampa USA as an online publication aimed at an Italian-American readership. The newsroom currently has five employees in New York and two in Washington DC and plans to hire contributors around the country. - Press Gazette (UK)
Requests that were once directly stated as imperatives were now couched with indirectness as merely suggestions or questions: “Shut the window,” became “Could you please shut the window?” And, in addition to saying “thanks,” responding with an acknowledgment of that thanks, such as “you’re welcome,” became routine. - Time
The 45-year-old actor blames his upbringing for mispronunciations, like calling a “library” a “liberry.” Fans seized on the gaffe. “I was like, you know what? Touché,” Palmini said. “Even though you said you want to burn the book now because I said ‘liberry,’ I get it. Truly. Noted. ‘Library’ it is.” - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
Multiple bestselling Big Five authors say they’ve gone to “war” with their publishers over AI and are considering abandoning traditional publishing altogether. - Wired
“’Maxxing" rose through the cultural lexicons of Gen Z and Gen Alpha quickly, ‘and now works as a noun, verb, adjective and adverb all at once. Leveling up your workout routine? ‘Gymmaxxing.’ Your personal care practices? ‘Healthmaxxing,’ an umbrella term that covers numerous subgenres, including ‘proteinmaxxing’ and ‘fibermaxxing.’” - CBS News
“Staff were told the title would rely increasingly on technology, data and AI to ‘reinvent the reader experience’. Newsroom insiders said they expected as many as 100 people to lose their jobs.” The move comes four months after The Telegraph was acquired by German media conglomerate Axel Springer. - The Guardian
The company is, in essence, a crowdfunding e-commerce site, belonging to the same category as Kickstarter, Patreon, Gumroad, and OnlyFans. But it has out-evolved its ancestors and bested its competitors in its relevance to public discourse and in its direct commodification of online parasocial relationships. - The New Yorker
The writer herself has questions."Writers are, often, to generalise, outsiders, observers, given to the long view, odd if not downright awkward. ... How do these propensities relate to the construction of literature as an international sport?" - Irish Times
"Turning to fiction allowed for stories that would otherwise have disappeared into the chest of time, to live on, and slowly but surely they are educating, bringing forth that we all share this place together. The 24-hour news cycle leaves little room for reflection or deeper understanding." - LitHub
The end, says Stephen Graham Jones."The story is running along the top of a flat mesa, and it's nighttime and 95% of it is even-footing. But then at the very end, you jump off into the night, into the darkness, and you trust." - NPR
Edgar Allan Poe "seems in deliberate, even flagrant, contrast with what were once regarded as the great themes of American literature: the freedom of self-reinvention promised by a new society and its frontier, exploration, rugged individualism, and the struggle to conquer nature." - Slate
Júlian Delgado Lopera: "'Most of the catastrophic violence in our history can be traced back to a man who hasn’t allowed himself to feel tenderness,' he affirms. ... He’s referring to a kind of violence that goes beyond the long-running armed conflict." - El País English
Author Gina Frangello: "Catapult is intrinsic to L.A. culture and L.A. literature. So many of their writers are in this area. ... It’s a huge loss for L.A. It’s a huge loss for the West Coast.” - Los Angeles Times
Why? The "bite-size format appeals to busy studio executives facing mountains of scripts. Buying unpublished stories also allows producers to avoid the hassle of optioning novels, whose fans often expect a faithful adaptation." - The New York Times
After all, we’ve been producing particle board for a long time. As Orwell observed (in pre-chatbot 1946!), “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” - The Walrus
