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Oxford University Press Has A Unionized Staff, But The Press Just Fired Thirteen Workers

Those remaining have filed a grievance. “These are the people who design OUP’s award-winning covers and graphics, do complex data work that sustains OUP’s digital products, and so much more. Together, they represent nearly two centuries of service and dedication to OUP’s mission.” - LitHub

Hollywood Prepares For The White British Men Likely To be Nominated For Oscars

The prime minister, Voldemort, and James Bond may face off in the spring. Er, that is, Hugh Grant, Ralph Fiennes, and Daniel Craig seem likely to snag a good number of nominations for their Very Serious Film work this year. - The Guardian (UK)

Fake Retro Video Games Are Worth How Much, Again?

A lot. “A video game trafficking ring has been smashed by police in Italy, after fake vintage consoles and games worth almost €50m ($55.5m) were seized. Among the counterfeit games were popular titles from the 1980s and 90s, including Mario Bros., Street Fighter and Star Wars.” - BBC

Fifty Years On, Nigeria’s Groundbreaking Twin Sister Act Gets Its Due

“The Lijadu Sisters were among the first — and fiercest — popular female artists, groundbreaking not only for their music (a mélange that included folky apala, funky Afrobeat and slinky disco) but also their feminism.” - The New York Times

We Need More, And Better, Depictions Of Old People In Books

And not 40-year-olds, y’all. “Truly older characters remain very rare in literature, with around only two to three percent of protagonists aged eighty or above. … highlights a gap in representation for our aging population, but also underscores the attributes that society deems worthy of fiction.” - LitHub

Found In The Archives, A Novel By Horror Master George A. Romero Sees The Light Of Day

Romero, of course, is known as a director - his most famous movie being Night of the Living Dead. But an archivist working on Romero’s papers “found the manuscript of a sprawling supernatural novel — one Romero had clearly worked on extensively, and apparently in secret.” - The New York Times

Two Iranian Directors Are Still Under House Arrest For A Gentle Comedy About An Old Married Couple

“The couple never meant to make political movies, Sanaeeha . ‘But in Iran, everything is political.’” (The issue here? A 70-year-old woman character doesn’t wear hijab … inside her own home.) - The Guardian (UK)

How Two Robbers Broke Into A London Gallery To Steal A Banksy

Though the work has been recovered, the entire exhibit is now off the walls at Grove Gallery. - BBC

Netflix’s Two-Part Season Drops Aren’t Working At All

Take Emily in Paris for the most recent, most egregious example: Even in Part 1, “the stories don’t have enough space. When you combine arcs that already aren’t fully developed with multiple new characters and force everything into two chunks of episodes, the result is an incongruity.” - HuffPost

What Brain Science Says Many Of Us Are Missing Right Now

“When we learn something with other people—be it a college study group, a cooking class, or workplace learning—we encode the information more robustly in the brain and feel more motivated to act.” A virtual environment can substitute, but basically, humans learn better with each other. - Fast Company

Dancer Michaela DePrince, A Trailblazer And Survivor Of War, Has Died At 29

"In the statement announcing her death, DePrince is described as ‘a beacon of hope for many, showing that no matter the obstacles, beauty and greatness can rise from the darkest of places.’” - NPR

Salman Rushdie, Anne Carson, Rachel Kushner Make National Book Award Longlists

Some of the fiction nominees are also on the Booker Prize Longlist, but this list adds many others, including short story collections, as well. - Washington Post (MSN)

With “Oscar,” Christopher Wheeldon Brings Explicit Same-Sex Love Into Classical Story Ballet

While same-sex pairings aren't unusual in contemporary dance or in abstract ballets, they're almost never seen even in new narrative ballets. With this new work about Oscar Wilde, commissioned by David Hallberg for the Australian Ballet, Wheeldon fills that gap — and considers just how much can be shown onstage. - The Guardian

AI’s Robot Problem

I have come to believe it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks. - Wired

James Earl Jones: More Than The Voice

The worry is that our remembrance will whittle down Jones’s vast career—spanning sixty years and encompassing more than two hundred turns in the theatre, on film, and on television—to, as with Plutarch’s nightingale picked clean, vox et praeterea nihil: a voice and nothing more. - The New Yorker

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