"As of April 1, the average entry-level salary for publishing employees located in New York City at the Big Five trade publishers and Scholastic was $47,583, up from $38,583 before the Covid-19 pandemic. … That marks an increase of 23.3%, during a period when prices rose 12.4%." - Publishers Weekly
It would, of course, be an anachronism to dub Shakespeare an environmentalist. But he was acutely aware of what we would term the environmental issues of his era. - The Conversation
Punctuation can be a nuisance; it is often simply neglected. Wrong! The most recent statistical analyses paint a different picture: punctuation seems to "grow out" of the foundations shared by all the (examined) languages, and its features are far from trivial. - Phys
"The ALA ... said in 2022 it had seen the highest number of reports of calls to remove or restrict books since it began compiling data more than 20 years ago." They had to expand their annual list of most-banned titles, too. - The Guardian
With 2023 marking 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, it is exciting to see how the Bard’s plays spoke to significant developments in the 16th-century mathematical world. - The Conversation
The book world is salivating. "Imagine the post-modernist-Austenite novel that would have been! Imagine the Mantel treatment being given to poor Charlotte Lucas, not-quite-good-enough-and-not-rich-enough and doomed to serve as vessel for the world’s most boring man." - LitHub
It's always the libraries. "Three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed, the most shocking statistics relate to public libraries."- The Atlantic
Just, like, wow. That is extremely cool. And: "'It’s people like you who give us hope, because you’re the next generation and you’re who’s going to be most affected it,' Blume told the teenager." - Variety
"Most of Buho's books are secondhand or donated, costing around $10 to keep them accessible. Literacy rates in the region are some of the lowest in the country, and Hernandez sees his store is something that can only help." - NPR
"I had a crisis of faith in the early days of the pandemic. I thought: books don’t do anything, maybe I should go and become a nurse? And then I realised that I was turning to poetry." - The Guardian (UK)
Tobias Wolff reflects on his unfilled notebooks and wonders, "At what point do the tools of writing go from functional objects in their own right to signifiers that give the trappings of being a writer without ever having to sit down and write?" - LitHub
It was not exactly easy, but Brian Maracle "has figured out this improbable, but linguistically extremely smart, method of delivering this radically different language to adults." - The New York Times
From July to December 2022, PEN found 1,477 cases of books being removed, up from 1,149 during the previous six months. Since the organization began tracking bans in July 2021, it has counted more than 4,000 instances of book removals. - The New York Times
Since 2000, the use of English words has shot up by 773% according to data from Italy’s Treccani dictionary. There are now around 9,000 English words printed in the latest edition. - The New European
"Ernest Moret, a French foreign rights manager with Editions La Fabrique was stopped as he attempted to enter the UK at St. Pancras train station under the pretense that he may have 'engaged in terrorist acts.' The acts? Protesting efforts by the French government to raise the retirement age." - Literary Hub
