WORDS

Linguistic assimilation was meant to unify Italy as a country. "Even by the 50s, though, Italian remained a made-up language, manufactured and largely spoken by the intelligentsia, and associated with politeness and self-control." - LitHub

A new movie revives the (surprisingly intense) discussion. "Isabelle Popp ... proposed a 'words to Fabio' standard for mainstream romance coverage that boils down to: the sooner he’s mentioned, the less effort or expertise went into the story." - Slate

Eric Yip is the youngest winner ever - and he's an engineering student. And "Yip, who cites Ocean Vuong as a writer who made him realise he 'had a right' to be heard, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, but writes poetry in English." - The Guardian (UK)

The lead organizer started a new union from scratch, and raised money through GoFundMe. "It looked like a quixotic venture," to vastly undersell the difficulties. But Jeff Bezos' rocket ship sure didn't help the company's argument. - Slate

That is, if you do enough digging - and enough reckoning, as Maud Newton, author of the memoir Ancestor Trouble, well knows. - The Rumpus

“I can’t tell you how stressed out these fines made our customers,” said Tienya Smith, a librarian who runs the branch in Long Island City, Queens. “Not having these fees erases all of that.” - The New York Times

Compiled by a French noblewoman circa 1256 and copied across Europe over the next two centuries, the Régime du corps ("body regimen") survives in 70-odd manuscripts that "offer a window into many aspects of everyday medieval life – from sleeping, bathing and preparing food to bloodletting, leeching and purging." - The Conversation

Duke has become known as a press that blends scholarly rigor with conceptual risk-taking, where high and low art boldly intermingle on principle. - The New Yorker

Every week, up in the Colorado Rockies, editor and publisher Dean Coombs prints roughly 400 copies of The Saguache Crescent on a Mergenthaler Model 14 linotype machine that his grandparents bought in 1920. - Smithsonian Magazine

Time was, these books were published only by indie presses and, at least in mainstream bookstores, shelved separately or not sold at all. Now sales are up over 100% in the past year and 740% over five years, and you can buy queer romances at Walmart. - The New York Times

Even in the hands of the greats, food scenes can seem less than central to a story, more filler or filigree than substance. - The Atlantic

This year’s conference was generally low on jargon, but there were still notable moments of turbidity in the conference guide. - Los Angeles Times

"Chain box stores were big businesses, sure, but they were also a crucial third space for casual hangouts and serendipitous run-ins that metro suburbs, smaller cities and rural places often lack." - Bloomberg CityLab

"On March 25, word started to spread on Twitter that a multitude of LGBTQ books — many of them by debut authors — were inexplicably missing from Target's website, despite a number of the titles having previously been listed for pre-order." - Publishers Weekly

It took a full-blown Twitter campaign to get the author's name, and the museum's name, and all of the museum's content, unbanned. You probably know what the problem was. - LitHub