What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. - The New Yorker
That is ... not going well (though romance readers are still gaga for M/M, W/W, and M/W hockey tales from more traditional channels). Fans "see the stories as cheap pandering that fails to engage with female and LGBTQ hockey fans’ concerns about homophobia and toxic masculinity in the sport." - Wired
As Substack has become a more respectable platform and mainstream academics have begun to join in some numbers, they have encountered a strange simulacrum of fields they thought they knew intimately. Cultural and symbolic capital seem to work differently here. - Paroxysms
"When you put your finger on every single book in order to type it into a spreadsheet, you really do think, ‘Am I willing to lose my job over this particular book?’ ... I think that is a real concern for teachers around the state." - The 74
"In total, this summer, 13 Ukrainian books have been destroyed by Russian missiles or drones – a third, estimates the government, of all books printed in Ukraine this year." - The Guardian (UK)
Emerging from Reddit, the subgenre is not fully defined, but "books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances." - The New York Times
Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement. - The New York Times
Books Unbanned is designed to give young people multiple ways to access digital books regardless of where they live or what their local library can provide. The library said some participants sign up because their local libraries have been censored or underfunded. - KOMO Seattle
Haitian-Canadian novelist Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That Or Die) was France’s literary sensation of the fall when another author claimed that Orélien used AI to write the novel. The Prix Goncourt removed the book from contention, but nevertheless, it’s currently the bestselling novel in France. - Rolling Stone
“We spoke with dozens of librarians at the A.L.A. conference this summer. They came from rural towns and major cities, elementary schools and universities, local branches and big government agencies. … They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and pop-up medical clinics.” - The New York Times
A foreign poetic form becomes local not when writers reproduce its original conventions faithfully, but when they discover what the form can do in a new language. In Hungary, Japanese short poetry encountered a literary environment already fluent in irony, epigrammatic compression, linguistic play, and knowing when to leave things out. - Asymptote
“(It) hasn’t simply been individual story lines, or how they jived with the historical reality in which we read them, but also the depth and breadth of human experience they charted. … Trudeau held the powerful to account, (yet) kept his attention on everyday people our politicians and (celebrities) often neglected.” - The New Republic
Utah just banned seven more books from all public schools — the most it has ever banned in a single go since the state’s sensitive materials law went into effect. The additions bring the total number of books now prohibited in Utah public schools to 44. - Salt Lake Tribune
A researcher has analyzed more than 500 of her “scribal letters” — correspondence from the queen but in the handwriting of her secretaries, notably principal royal secretary Francis Walsingham — and found that they sometimes altered the queen’s own language for strategic reasons, including to make her appear even angrier than she was. - Smithsonian Magazine
"Our public libraries are public and should stay public. We don't need private corporations coming in and laying people off and censoring material." - ABC Fresno
