Bande dessinée (comic strip) is considered the “ninth art” in France, and the Festival international de la bande dessinée d'Angoulême is its pinnacle. But the culture ministry has withdrawn €200,000 in subsidy while graphic novelists and publishers are boycotting the event after a staffer who lodged a rape complaint was fired. - The Guardian
None of us are academic philosophers, by any means; we have busy jobs and other pressing adult responsibilities. But the process has proved fruitful. A camaraderie emerges, I’ve found, when a group dedicates itself to a task that requires great effort. - The New York Times
Usually you have to return books you get from a library. Today the New York Public Library will give books away — 1,000 books from its list of the best titles of 2025, chosen by more than 80 librarians from branches across the library’s system. If you get one, you won’t have to return it. - The New York Times
Winners include Rabih Alameddine's Beirut-set The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Fiction), Omar El Akkad’s examination of the war in Gaza, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Nonfiction), and Daniel Nayeri’s The Teacher of Nomad Land, set in World War II-era Iran (Young People’s Literature). - NPR
The project is digitizing U.S. newspapers that are are now in the public domain (after 95 years). The center also has permission to place online certain titles still under copyright. Other U.S. Black papers still under copyright are available on site, as are publications from the Caribbean and Africa. - The Christian Science Monitor
This is the second time that the Laotian-Canadian author has won Canada’s top literary award; she is only the fourth author to do so, after Esi Edugyan, M.G. Vassanji and Alice Munro. - Canadian Press (Yahoo!)
“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media”. - The Guardian
Taylor and Travis, podcast hosts, even chatbots — this has been a year full of intense but one-sided relationships between some ordinary individuals and celebrities (or pieces of code) they’ve never actually met. - Cambridge University Press
There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. ‘OK . . .’ ‘Thanks . . .’ ‘See you next week . . .’ Sometimes they’re a playful way to build suspense, sometimes a form of passive aggression, and sometimes they relay an implication. - Granta
Viet Thanh Nguyen: “When poets write, the only thing that it costs a poet is their life. ... But when you make a TV show or a film, it costs tens of millions of dollars, and then everybody cares.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
"When we listen to audiobooks produced in the West, they have a Wakandan accent," said Eghosa Imasuen, executive director of Narrative Landscape Press in Lagos, Nigeria. "Nobody talks like that on the continent." - Publishers Weekly
“’The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983’ was published in The Guardian in 2014 and gave the title to Mantel’s collection of short stories that year. … Billed as a psychological thriller, the adaptation is by Alexandra Wood and will be directed by John Young at (Liverpool’s) Everyman Theatre in May.” - The Guardian
“Fans of the popular danmei same-sex romance genre, written and read mainly by straight women, say the Chinese government is carrying out the largest crackdown yet on it, effectively neutering the enjoyment. In the world of fantasy, danmei is relatively straightforward: Two men stand in for idealized relationships, from chaste to erotic.” - AP
In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published, with the help of Roma Lister, Aradia, or the gospel of the witches, which purported to record an ancient tradition of female-led sorcery in Italy. In the 1950s, “mother of Wicca” Doreen Valiente used the book to shape Wicca as it exists today. - The Public Domain Review
