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Poet And Professor Refaat Alareer Has Been Killed In Gaza By An Israeli Airstrike

The poem pinned to the popular creative writing teacher's Twitter/X account since November is called "If I must die, let it be a tale." - LitHub

Women Have Moved To The Center Of K-Dramas

Actress Uhm Jung-hwa says there's a shift from the 1990s, when women characters were focused on finding husbands: "Now we can see many strong female characters boldly embracing life on their own terms." - BBC

The Best Book Covers Of 2023

Right, don't judge a book by its cover, but go ahead and judge the covers. - The New York Times

The Quiet Plan To Make The Internet Dramatically Faster

There are so many potential bottlenecks for the speed of something we rely on: "Each part of the network (such as switches, routers, modems, etc.) has its own limit on how much data it can handle." Can this change? - The Verge

Benjamin Zephaniah, Poet, Actor, Musician, And Activist, Has Died At 65

Zephaniah, who refused an OBE, "was heavily influenced by Jamaican music and poetry, and he was often classified as a dub poet." - The Guardian (UK)

Wikipedia’s Most Prolific Road And Highway Editors Left The Site

Then they made their own wiki. "Behind this seemingly amusing clash of nerds is a far more pressing issue: how to reconcile 20 years of Wikipedia’s core principles and values with the practical demands of present circumstances." - Slate

How Culture Got Captured By Big Tech

There is an expression often used to capture the power of the press: never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Today the ink is barrelled inside algorithms we don’t own. - The Walrus

A Critic, His Experiences, His Aesthetic

The question of the relation between one’s life and one’s taste has become a fraught one, and is still more troubled when the taste in question has a kind of public authority—as Sasha Frere-Jones came to have for readers of the New Yorker, the LA Times, and the Village Voice. - BookForum

Nobel Lit Prize Winner Jon Fosse On What He Has To Say To The World

“I often say that there are two languages: The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” And it’s in that “silent language,” he added, that the real meaning may lie. - The New York Times

“Prestige TV” Is Booming In Asia

Streaming giants in the region are increasingly placing their series bets on creators armed with a glittering list of prizes from the international festival circuit, and independent filmmakers and producers are making high-production-value shows with small-to-midrange budgets. The result? A veritable “prestige TV” wave on streamers. - The Hollywood Reporter

Study: 17 Percent Of Entertainment Workers Lost Jobs During The Writers/Actors Strikes

According to the Otis College of Art and Design’s study, the first released under the college’s ongoing Otis College Report on the Creative Economy, following the WGA, 24,799 entertainment industry employees in Los Angeles were let go, or more than 1.5 in every 10 workers. - Variety

Nintendo Cancels Its Annual Tokyo Gaming Showcase Over Safety Threats

Nintendo canceled its upcoming video game showcase and postponed several other events because of persistent threats to the company, its workers and players. - AP

At 42, Not Only Is Alina Cojocaru Still Dancing, She’s Producing

She and husband Johan Kobborg left London's Royal Ballet a decade ago; she spent seven years at English National Ballet, then became a busy, much-feted freelance soloist. Now, after two kids and the pandemic, she's producing an adaptation of Fellini's La Strada and starring as Gelsomina. - The Guardian

Decoding Noam Chomsky

From the start of his academic career, no part of his scientific work would show up in his political activism, while no trace of his activism would be detectable in his science. Among the inevitable outcomes was a conception of language utterly divorced from what most of us mean by that term. - Aeon

Keeping Traditional Japanese Dance Alive In Mexico City

Naoko Kihara, the daughter of Japanese-Brazilian immigrants to Mexico, has been practicing hanayagi dance in the Mexican capital for nearly a quarter of a century and is passing the art along to students in the Japanese diaspora community there. - AP

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